Immigrant Business Owner Activity in the Pandemic and Recovery

Robert Fairlie and Robert W. Fairlie

No 12655, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: The paper provides a descriptive analysis of both the early impacts of COVID on business activity among immigrants and the economic recovery over the next few years. The findings indicate that immigrant business owners were disproportionately affected by COVID in the first month of the pandemic when mandated shutdowns through social distancing restrictions were the most severe. Immigrant business activity recovered somewhat inconsistently through the end of 2020 but started a longer-term upward trend in both absolute terms and relative terms over the next few years. By the end of 2024, the number of active immigrant business owners increased to 3.9 million compared with 3.0 million just prior to the start of the pandemic. Growth in the Construction, Transportation, Professional and Business Services, and Financial Activities industry groups fueled total growth in immigrant business activity during the recovery period. The percentage of the labor force owning an active business is 3.5 percentage points higher than U.S. born active business ownership rates, which is larger than the 1.8 percentage point gap before the pandemic started.

Keywords: entrepreneurship; self-employment; business ownership; COVID; pandemic; recovery; immigrant; immigration; inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent and nep-mig
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp12655.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:ces:ceswps:_12655

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().