Fritsch M. and Wyrwich M. The long persistence of regional levels of entrepreneurship: Germany, 1925-2005, Regional Studies. This paper investigates the persistent levels of self-employment and new ...business formation in different time periods and under different framework conditions. The analysis shows that regional differences regarding the level of self-employment and new business formation tend to be persistent for periods as long as eighty years, despite abrupt and drastic changes in the political-economic environment. This pronounced persistence demonstrates the existence of regional entrepreneurship culture that tends to have long-lasting effects.
Despite the consensus that entrepreneurship runs in the family, we lack evidence regarding the total importance of family and community background, as well as the relative importance of different ...background influences that affect entrepreneurship. We draw on human capital formation theories to argue that families and communities provide a salient context for the development of individual entrepreneurial skills and preferences, beyond the existing focus on parental entrepreneurship. We posit that early influences are more important than later influences and propose a hierarchy of family influences, whereby genes have the largest explanatory power, followed by parental entrepreneurship, neighborhoods, and parental resources, and finally by parental immigration, family structure, and sibling peers. Finally, we argue that the higher human and financial capital intensity of incorporated relative to unincorporated entrepreneurship predictably alters the hierarchy of family influences, as does gender. Sibling correlations estimated on Swedish register data confirm our hypotheses.
•We theorize a hierarchy of family and community influences in entrepreneurship.•Early influences matter more than later influences for human capital formation.•Family and community background explains up to 45% of variation in entrepreneurship.•Shared genes matter most, then parental entrepreneurship, resources, and neighborhoods.•Incorporation draws more strongly on parental resources and type-specific role models.
We investigate how self-employment in East Germany was impacted by 40 years of Soviet-style communism and the subsequent shock transition to a market economic system. To this end, we compare ...self-employment in East and West Germany after reunification with self-employment before the separation of Germany after World War II. Our results show that the strict anti-entrepreneurial policies prevalent during the Soviet regime do not have a long-run negative effect on self-employment in East Germany. Quite to the contrary, self-employment in East Germany today is higher than before German separation. This finding cannot be explained by necessity self-employment. Our analysis suggests that current differences in self-employment between East and West Germany are pre-dominantly a result of the sudden shock transformation that occurred with reunification, rather than the outcome of four decades of anti-entrepreneurial policies and ideology.
This annual edition of Labour Force Statistics provides detailed statistics on labour force, employment and unemployment, broken down by gender, as well as unemployment duration, employment status, ...employment by sector of activity and part-time employment.
While the spread of digital technologies and the growth of associated atypical forms of work are attracting increasing attention, little is known about the impact of these new forms of work on ...psychological well‐being. This paper examines the effect of Uber diffusion on the mental health of drivers, taking advantage of the rollout of Uber across UK regions. We match individual‐level information on health and sociodemographic characteristics from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (Understanding Society) between 2009 and 2019 with data on the diffusion of Uber across the country. We first show that Uber diffusion is positively associated with mental health, as measured by the General Health Questionnaire, in the population group of self‐employed drivers. We argue that this positive correlation captures a selection effect (of comparatively healthier individuals into the category of self‐employed drivers after Uber entry) and the omission of unobserved factors, rather than a causal effect. Indeed, we do not observe any improvement in mental health for workers who were already self‐employed drivers before Uber entry. In parallel with this, among individuals who remained salaried drivers over time, our results suggest there may be a decline in mental health after Uber's introduction, probably because they feel the competition from Uber drivers.
It is well documented that the self-employed experience higher levels of happiness than waged employees even when their incomes are lower. Given the UK government’s asymmetric treatment of waged ...workers and the self-employed, we use a unique Covid-19 period data set which covers the months leading up to the March lockdown and the months just after to assess three aspects of the Covid-19 crisis on the self-employed: hours of work reductions, the associated income reductions and the effects of both on subjective well-being. Our findings show the large and disproportionate reductions in hours and income for the self-employed directly contributed to a deterioration in their levels of subjective well-being compared to waged workers. It appears that their resilience was broken when faced with the reality of dealing with rare events, particularly when the UK welfare support response was asymmetric and favouring waged employees.
There is a research gap with respect to understanding the role of cultural attitudes in favour of entrepreneurial activity for actual start-up behaviour. The paper combines historical self-employment ...data with a psychological measure for entrepreneurial attitudes. The results reveal a positive relationship between the historical level of self-employment in a region and the presence of people with an entrepreneurial personality structure today. This measure is positively related not only to the level of new business formation but also to the amount of innovation activity.
In many industrialised countries, including the Netherlands, the share of solo self-employed workers has strongly increased in recent years. This development is subject to a lot of public debate as ...it is feared that this increase is caused by ‘quasi’ self-employment. There still seems to be little consensus, however, on what constitutes ‘genuine’ self-employment and what not. In this article we present a theoretical framework for ‘quasi’ solo self-employment and discuss how the various indicators for ‘quasi’ self-employment that are used in the literature fit in this framework. We then compare the outcomes of different indicators by applying them to solo self-employed workers in the Netherlands. The data used for the analysis are taken from the Dutch Labour Force Survey (NL-LFS) 2017 complemented with the European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) ad hoc module 2017 on self-employment. Our results show that about 7% of the solo self-employed workers is dependent on one client. Furthermore, almost 20% of all solo self-employed had an involuntary start. The correspondence between dependency and involuntariness is very low: less than 2% of the solo self-employed workers are both dependent and involuntary. Both dependency and voluntariness are related to the fiscal and legal status of the solo self-employed workers and to the type of work activities. Solo self-employed workers that own their own business and who mainly sell products are less likely to be dependent and/or involuntary self-employed compared to those who do not own a business and/or offer services. Dependency is hardly related to the unfavourable outcomes of solo self-employment. Involuntariness, on the contrary, seems to have some impact on outcomes. Those who became self-employed because they couldn’t find a job as an employee have a higher probability to be unsatisfied with their job, to have financial problems or problems due to a lack of work or a low income. Nevertheless even among the involuntary solo self-employed workers, the majority does not report negative outcomes.
Despite lower incomes, the self-employed consistently report higher satisfaction with their jobs. But are self-employed individuals also happier, more satisfied with their lives as a whole? High job ...satisfaction might cause them to neglect other important domains of life, such that the fulfilling job crowds out other pleasures, leaving the individual on the whole not happier than others. Moreover, selfemployment is often chosen to escape unemployment, not for the associated autonomy that seems to account for the high job satisfaction. We apply matching estimators that allow us to better take into account the above-mentioned considerations and construct an appropriate control group (in terms of balanced covariates). Using the BHPS dataset that comprises a large nationally representative sample of the British populace, we find that individuals who move from regular employment into self-employment experience an increase in life satisfaction (up to 2 years later), while individuals moving from unemployment to self-employment are not more satisfied than their counterparts moving from unemployment to regular employment. We argue that these groups correspond to "opportunity" and "necessity" entrepreneurship, respectively. These findings are robust with regard to different measures of subjective well-being as well as choice of matching variables, and also robustness exercises involving "simulated confounders".
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