Being your own boss: the many faces of self-employment

Pamela Lenton

No 2017003, Working Papers from The University of Sheffield, Department of Economics

Abstract: The number of individuals registered as self-employed in the UK has grown considerablyover the past decade. The economics literature generally agrees that the self-employedwork longer hours than their counterparts who are in paid employment and earn less.However, most of the literature considers the self-employed as a homogeneous group ofindividuals, whereas in reality, the term now encompasses a variety of very differententrepreneurs, such as businesses or partnerships, sole traders, freelance workers andsub-contractors. Using UK panel data, this paper examines the differences in thecharacteristics of self-employed individuals by self-employment type to highlight thedifference between these groups and their employed counterparts. Random effect probitestimations that model the determinants of being in different self-employment groupshighlight the heterogeneous nature of self-employment and their different determinants.Wage estimations reveal different returns to separate classifications of self-employment.

Keywords: Self-employment; Autonomy; Entrepreneurship (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J20 J21 J24 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2017-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-eur and nep-lma
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/economics/research/serps/articles/2017_003 First version, January 2017 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:shf:wpaper:2017003

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