Showing 1 - 10 of 146
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,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010269524
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010282433
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010282549
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010268591
Microcredit is an innovative financial tool designed to reduce poverty and fix credit market imperfections. We use experimental measures of time discounting and risk aversion for villagers in south India to highlight behavioral features of microcredit. Conditional on borrowing from any source,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010269753
In a recent randomized experiment we found mean returns to capital of between 5 and 6 percent per month in Sri Lankan microenterprises, much higher than market interest rates. But returns were found to be much higher among men than among women, and indeed were not different from zero for women....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010275824
This paper is a review of the literature in economics up to the early 1980s on the issue of estimating the earnings return to schooling and labor market experience. It begins with a presentation of Adam Smith's (1776) analysis of wage determination, with the second of his five points on...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014469442
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010267669
The objective of this paper is to assess the relationship between the health and the income from work of wage earners and self-employed workers in Cameroon. Health status is measured by a self-assessment of an individual's health; and income is measured by the monthly wage of the wage earners...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010293185
Utilising a large representative data set for Germany, this study contrasts absenteeism of self-employed individuals and paid employees. We find that absence from work is clearly less prevalent among the self-employed than among paid employees. Only to a small extent, this difference can be...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010329000