Immigrants are widely perceived as being highly entrepreneurial and important for economic growth and innovation. This is reflected in immigration policies and many developed countries have created special visas and entry requirements in an attempt to attract immigrant entrepreneurs. Not...

Developing further the accumulating evidence that self-employment attracts optimists, this paper investigates the relationship between earnings and prior optimism. It finds that self-employed optimists earn less than self-employed realists. Amongst employees, optimists earn more. These results...

In the UK by late 2014 there were almost 0.75m more self-employed than at the start of the financial crisis in early 2008. This represents over 75% of jobs growth in the UK over the same period. This experience has attracted commentary from independent policy analysts and others, focusing on...

This paper exploits the rapid rise in self-employment rates in post-communist Eastern Europe as a valuable "quasi-experiment" for understanding the sources of entrepreneurship. A relative demand-supply model and an individual sectoral choice model are used to analyze a 1993 survey of 27,000...

Only a minority of micro-businesses create jobs for others. This paper addresses whether personal characteristics and resources of the microbusiness owner or the local external economic environment are drivers of job creation. In the UK context of significant growth in self-employment but a...

The dynamics of startup activity are crucial for job creation, innovation, and a competitive economy. Does regional firm formation exhibit hysteresis, such that shocks, including those induced by temporary policy interventions, have permanent effects? Due to the pronounced heterogeneity among...

This paper focuses on the entrepreneurial undertaking of immigrants and natives in Germany. We first study factors that affect the sorting of individuals into self-employment and then we investigate whether self-employment has a differential effect on the wages of individual workers and can lead...

How valuable is education for entrepreneurs' performance as compared to employees'? What might explain any differences? And does education affect peoples' occupational choices accordingly? We answer these questions based on a large panel of US labor force participants. We show that education...

This paper systematically investigates whether different kinds of personality characteristics influence entrepreneurial development. On the basis of a large, representative household panel survey, we examine the extent to which the Big Five traits and further personality characteristics, which...