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

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

No 3250, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: Using recently-available data from the New Immigrant Survey, we find that previous selfemployment 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 self-employment 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-geo, nep-lab and nep-mig
Date: 2007-12
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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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