The Persistence of Self-Employment Across Borders: New Evidence on Legal Immigrants to the United States

Randall Akee (), David Jaeger () and Konstantinos Tatsiramos ()
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Randall Akee: IZA

No 69, Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary

Abstract: Using recently-available data from the New Immigrant Survey, we find that previous self-employment experience in an immigrant’s country of origin is an important determinant of their self-employment status in the U.S., increasing the probability of being self-employed by about 7 percent. Our results improve on the previous literature by measuring home-country selfemployment directly rather than relying on proxy measures. We find little evidence to suggest that home-country self-employment has a significant effect on U.S. wages in either paid employment or self employment.

Keywords: Self-employment; entrepreneurship; New Immigrant Survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J61 J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-lab and nep-mig
Date: Written 2007-12-20

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http://web.wm.edu/economics/wp/cwm_wp69.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Persistence of Self-Employment Across Borders: New Evidence on Legal Immigrants to the United States (2007)
Working Paper: The Persistence of Self-Employment Across Borders: New Evidence on Legal Immigrants to the United States (2007)
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