Over the past half-century, while self-employment has consistently accounted for around one in ten of the United States workforce, its composition has changed. Since 1970, industries with high startup capital requirements have declined from 53% of self-employment to 23%. This same time period...

n this paper I examine changes in self-employment that have occurred since the early 1980s in the United States. It is a companion paper to a recent equivalent paper that related to the UK. Data on random samples of approximately twenty million US workers are examined taken from the Basic...

Startups in IT and life sciences appear to be flourishing. However, startups in other sectors, such as new materials, automation, and eco-innovations, which are often called "deep tech", seem to struggle. We argue that innovations with both technical and commercial challenges, typical of deep...

Small business owners and others in self-employment have the option to transition to paid work. If there is initial uncertainty about entrepreneurial earnings, this option increases the expected lifetime value of self-employment relative to pay in a single year. This paper first documents that...

Do potential entrepreneurs remain in wage employment because of concerns that they will face worse job opportunities should their entrepreneurial ventures fail? Using a Canadian reform that extended job-protected leave to one year for women giving birth after a cutoff date, we study whether the...

This paper examines the pattern of self-employment in Australia and the United States. We particularly focus on the movement of young people in and out of self-employment using comparable longitudinal data from the two countries. We find that the forces that influence whether a person becomes...

Nearly a quarter of Mexico's workforce is self employed. But in the U.S. 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 composition nor...

Good data on the size and composition of the independent contractor workforce are elusive, with household survey and administrative tax data often disagreeing on levels and trends. We carried out a series of focus groups to learn how self-employed independent contractors speak about their work....

We use de-identified data from California personal income tax returns to measure the frequency and nature of independent contracting and self-employment work in California. We identify this work by the presence of a Schedule C on the tax return and/or the receipt of a Form 1099 information...

Rising self-employment rates in U.S. tax data that are absent in survey data have led to speculation that tax records capture a rise in new "gig" work that surveys miss. Drawing on the universe of IRS tax returns, we show that trends in firm-reported payments to "gig" and other contract workers...