Academicians and policymakers have argued that entrepreneurship provides a route out of poverty and an alternative to unemployment or discrimination in the labor market. Existing research, however, provides little evidence from longitudinal data on the relationship between business ownership and...

Using Current Population Survey (CPS) microdata, I examine trends and the causes of the trends from 1979 to 1998 in business ownership among several ethnic/racial groups in the United States. I find rapid growth rates for the number of self-employed blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans...