We conduct a randomized experiment in Sri Lanka to measure the impact of the most commonly used business training course in developing countries, the Start-and-Improve Your Business (SIYB) program. In contrast to existing business training evaluations which are restricted to microfinance...

Middle class values have long been perceived as drivers of social cohesion and growth. In this paper we investigate the relation between class (measured by the position in the income distribution), values, and political orientations using comparable values surveys for six Latin American...

We revisit the link between poverty, the middle class and institutional outcomes using a newly developed cross-country panel dataset containing detailed information on the distribution of income and expenditures. When the size of the middle class increases (measured as the proportion of people...

The informal sector plays an important role in the functioning of labor markets in emerging economies. To characterize better this highly heterogeneous sector, we conduct a distributional analysis of the earnings gap between informal and formal employment in Brazil, Mexico and South Africa,...

Using a large representative German data set and various concepts of self-employment, this paper tests the jack-of-all-trades view of entrepreneurship by Lazear (AER 2004). Consistent with its theoretical assumptions we find that self-employed individuals perform more tasks and that their work...

Using a large data set for Germany, we show that both the raw and the unexplained gender earnings gap are higher in self-employment than in paid employment. Applying an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, more than a quarter of the difference in monthly self-employment earnings can be traced back to...

If certain start-up characteristics will indicate a business success, knowing such characteristics could generate more successful start-ups and more efficient start-up counseling. Our study will contribute to this by quantifying individual success determinants of freelance start-ups. The data...

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...

We study the self-employed decision and its relation to human and social capital. Human capital is necessary to acquire skills. Social capital dampens the effects of uncertainty about future income. Our data set consists of 1339 respondents from the same age group, who were interviewed three...

This paper contributes to the policy-relevant question whether self-employment is a way out of (long-term) unemployment. We estimate the relationship between the entry rate into self-employment and previous (long-term) unemployment on the basis of pseudo-panel data for Germany in the period...