Our paper contributes to the studies on the relationship between workers' human capital and their decision to become self-employed as well as their probability to survive as entrepreneurs. Analysis from a panel data set of research analysts in investment banks over 1988-1996 reveals that star...

Some commentators have suggested that the absence of portable health insurance impedes people from leaving their jobs to start new firms. We investigate this belief by comparing wage-earners who become self-employed during a given period of time with their counterparts who do not. By examining...

How does consumer credit access impact job flows, earnings, and entrepreneurship? To answer this question, we build a new administrative dataset which links individual employment and entrepreneur tax records to TransUnion credit reports, and we exploit the discrete increase in consumer credit...

This paper uses the Italian Social Security employer-employee panel to study the effects of the Italian reform of 1990 on worker and job flows. We exploit the fact that this reform increased unjust dismissal costs for firms below 15 employees, while leaving dismissal costs unchanged for bigger...

This paper investigates the effect of entrepreneurs' personal income tax situations on their use of labor. We analyze the income tax returns of a large number of sole proprietors before and after the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and determine how the substantial reductions in marginal tax rates...

The question of how entrepreneurship relates to income mobility is cogent given the current public debate about the sources of income inequality and mobility in United States society. We examine how experience with entrepreneurship has affected an individual's place in the earnings distribution....

A rapidly growing literature examines the impact of immigrants on the labor market outcomes of native-born Americans. However, the impact of immigration on natives in self-employment has not been examined, despite the over-representation of immigrants in that sector. We first present a new...

This paper describes measurement of a self-employment rate and the important role the agricultural sector plays in any analysis of the determinants of self-employment. The determinants of the self-employment rate are modeled using a panel of 23 countries for the period 1966-1996. A similar...

We focus on the intergenerational transmission of the propensity to be self-employed. Our emphasis is on the role of family background, and in particular, on what we call the intergenerational pick-up rate with respect to self-employment, the probability that a person with a self-employed parent...