This comment provides a critical evaluation of Blanchflower’s (2004) survey of various aspects of self-employment and his overall normative conclusion that “more may not be better”. In order to draw normative conclusions regarding the optimal level of self-employment a number of issues ignored by Blanchflower need to be addressed. First, self-employment may or may not be entrepreneurial. Second...

There are concerns about the attachment of immigrants to the labor force, and the potential policy responses. This paper uses a bi-national survey on immigrant performance to investigate the sorting of individuals into full-time paid-employment and entrepreneurship and their economic success. Particular attention is paid to the role of legal status at entry in the host country (worker, refugee,...

Changing Patterns of Ethnic Minority Self-Employment in Britain: Evidence from Census Microdata The over-representation of certain ethnic minority and immigrant groups in self-employment is, in common with other developed countries, a notable feature of the UK labour market. Compared to substantial growth in self-employment in the 1980s, the 1990s saw overall selfemployment rates plateau. Despi...

Although self-employment is an important labor force phenomenon at older ages, there is a paucity of studies that examine the patterns of self-employment among older U.S. workers. With the leading edge of the baby boom cohort reaching retirement years, the rising rates of selfemployment with age suggest that it is important to have a solid understanding of who is selfemployed at older ages and ...

This paper examines the use of self-employment among people with disabilities in Europe. Using data from the European Community Household Panel for the period 1995–2001 for 13 European countries we found that people with disabilities were more likely to be self-employed than people without disabilities. Self-employment provides flexibility and a better adjustment between disability status and w...

A relatively small, but growing, body of literature uses microdata from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) to study self-employment and entrepreneurship among young adults. The topics covered in these studies include, but are not limited to, the determinants of entrepreneurship, earnings growth among entrepreneurs, the returns to self-employment, the relationship between cr...

This paper analyses the labour market transitions of unemployed individuals. We are particularly interested in why some individuals become self-employed instead of wage or salary earners upon returning to employment. Using Finnish microdata and a multinomial logit model we find that when we compare unemployed individuals ́ probability of moving into a wage or salary work with the probability of ...

Labor Market Assimilation and the Self-Employment Decision of Immigrant Entrepreneurs This paper uses data from the 1980 and 1990 U.S. Censuses to study labor market assimilation of self-employed immigrants. Separate earnings functions for the self-employed and wage/salary workers are estimated. To control for endogenous sorting into the sectors, models of the self-employment decision are estim...

Labor Market Assimilation and the Self-Employment Decision of Immigrant Entrepreneurs This paper uses data from the 1980 and 1990 U.S. Censuses to study labor market assimilation of self-employed immigrants. Separate earnings functions for the self-employed and wage/salary workers are estimated. To control for endogenous sorting into the sectors, models of the self-employment decision are estim...