Black-White Gap in Self-Employment in the U.S.: Do Cohort and Within Race Differences Exist?

Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere and Willie Belton

No 5071, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In this paper we ask three questions: First, is there evidence of a Black-White gap in self-employment between 1994-2002 and could the inclusion of the White immigrant population be driving this result? Second, do within race differences in self-employment exist among the U.S. born? Finally, do cohort differences in the Black-White self-employment gap exist among the U.S. born? These questions are based on some of the regression findings in our earlier paper focused on the role of information and institutions in understanding the Black-White gap in self-employment. We find that the Black-White self-employment gap is not driven by the existence of White immigrants in the data set. In addition, we find that within race and cohort differences exist in the Black-White self-employment gap. A subgroup of U.S. born African-Americans have a self-employment probability that is identical to that of U.S. born White-Americans. In addition, younger cohorts of African-Americans have a much smaller self-employment gap than do older African-Americans.

Keywords: self-employment; disparities; black-white gap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J10 J11 J15 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2010-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-lab and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - revised version published in: Small Business Economics, 2013, 41 (1), 25-39

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp5071.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5071

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().