This study reviews key policy challenges relating to solo self-employed workers––the segment with increasing shares in the workforce most developed countries recent decades. We document that this attracts attention of policymakers within four domains: addressing decent work deficits, entrepreneurship and small business policies, activating marginalized groups through self-employment, improving ...

Theoretical models of self-employment posit that attitudes toward risk, entrepreneurial ability, and preferences for autonomy are central to the individual's decision between selfemployment and wage/salary work. None of the studies in the rapidly growing empirical literature on self-employment, however, have been able to test whether these factors are important determinants of self-employment. ...

BACKGROUND Doctors have a low prevalence of sickness absence. Employment status is a determinant in the multifactorial background of sickness absence. The effect of doctors' employment status on sickness absence is unexplored. The study compares the number of sickness absence days during the last 12 months and the impact of employment status, psychosocial work stress, self-rated health and demo...

It’s the Opportunity Cost, Stupid! How Self-Employment Responds to Financial Incentives of Return, Risk and Skew There is no robust empirical support for the effect of financial incentives on the decision to work in self-employment rather than as a wage earner. In the literature, this is seen as a puzzle. We offer a focus on the opportunity cost, i.e. the wages given up as an employee. Informat...

Millions of East-Europeans started businesses during the transformational recession but, according to a wide-spread interpretation, many of them did so only temporarily and ‘unwillingly’ under the threat of unemployment. The paper looks at the relevance of the ‘disguised unemployment approach to entrepreneurship’ using regional data.It first examines how net flows into self-employment were affe...

Self-Employment: A Way to End Unemployment? Empirical Evidence from German Pseudo-Panel Data 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 selfemployment and previous (long-term) unemployment on the basis of pseudo-panel data for Germany in the period 1996-2002. Th...