Horatio Alger Meets the Mobility Tables

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Harvey Rosen () and Robert Weathers

No 7619, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The question of how entrepreneurship relates to income mobility is cogent given the current public debate about the sources of income inequality and mobility in United States society. We examine how experience with entrepreneurship has affected an individual's place in the earnings distribution. Our basic tack is to follow individuals' positions in the income distribution over time, and to see how their mobility (or lack thereof) was affected by involvement with entrepreneurship. Our main finding is that for low-income individuals there is some merit to the notion that the self-employed moved ahead in the earnings distribution relative to those who remained wage earners. On the other hand, for those at the upper end of the earnings distribution, those who became self-employed often advanced less in the earnings distribution than their salaried counterparts.

JEL-codes: D31 J23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: Written
Note: PE
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7619.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
Journal Article: Horatio Alger Meets the Mobility Tables (2000)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7619

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7619
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().