Determinants of self-employment among commuters and non-commuters

Mikaela Backman and Charlie Karlsson ()

No 365, Working Paper Series in Economics and Institutions of Innovation from Royal Institute of Technology, CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies

Abstract: In this paper, we analyse the determinants of the decision to become self-employed among commuters and non-commuters. In the entrepreneurship literature it is claimed that the rich-ness and quality of an individual’s business, professional and social networks play an im-portant role for the decision to become self-employed. People that commute between localities in the same region or between localities in different regions will most proba¬bly be able to develop richer personal networks than non-commuters, since they can develop network links both in the locality where they live and in the locality where they work. In this paper, we test this hypothesis using micro-data for around three million individuals in Sweden. As far as we know, this is the first time this hypothesis is tested. In our empirical analysis, we make a distinction between three groups of individuals: non-com¬muters, intra-regions commuter and inter-region commuters. For each of this groups we test how the probability of becoming self-employed is influenced by a number of characteristics of individuals, characteristics of home and work localities and regions. Our results indicate a significant difference between non-commuters and commuters in terms of the role of networks for becoming self-employed. On the one hand, we find for non-commuters that living and working in a locality with rich business networks reduce the probability of becoming self-employed. For commuters, on the other hand we find that working in a locality with rich business networks increase the probability to become self-employed. In this latter case, living in a municipality with rich business networks has a non-significant effect on the probability of becoming self-employed. Our results indicate that it is the business networks where people work, rather than where they live that exerts a positive influence on the probability of becoming self-employed.

Keywords: entrepreneurship; individual attributes; regional attributes; networks; micro-level data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 J24 L26 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2014-05-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-eur, nep-geo, nep-lab, nep-sbm and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Journal Article: Determinants of self-employment among commuters and non-commuters (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:cesisp:0365

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