Nearly a quarter of Mexico's workforce is self employed. In the United States, however, rates of self employment among Mexican Americans are only 6 percent, about half the rate among non-Latino whites. Using data from the Mexican and U.S. population census, we show that neither industrial...

This article proposes a simultaneous probit equation framework to analyse the business ownership patterns of married couples in the United States. A structural model of knowledge spillovers within couples is formulated and estimated. Empirical analysis reveals significant and substantial...

Is the vast army of the self-employed in low income countries a source of employment generation? We use data from surveys in Sri Lanka to compare the characteristics of own account workers (non-employers) with wage workers and with owners of larger firms. We use a rich set of measures of...

Using recently-available data from the New Immigrant Survey, we find that previous self-employment experience in an immigrant's country of origin is an important determinant of their self-employment status in the U.S., increasing the probability of being self-employed by about 7 percent. Our...

We utilize individual panel data from the 1996 and 2001 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to analyze the relative success of self-employed female Hispanics. To allow for a meaningful comparison of earnings between self-employed and wage/salary employed women, we generate...