Self-Employment Across 15 European Countries

Niels Noorderhaven (), Roy Thurik, Sander Wennekers and André van Stel

ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam

Abstract: This paper deals with differences in the rate of self-employment (business ownership) in 15 European countries for the period 1978-2000, focusing on the influence of dissatisfaction and using the framework of occupational choice. Using two different measures of dissatisfaction, in addition to the level of economic development, the unemployment rate and income differentials, we find that dissatisfaction at the level of societies is the most significant factor for explaining differences in self-employment levels. Dissatisfaction with life and with the way democracy works are both found to be positively related to self-employment. It is concluded that these are proxies for job dissatisfaction and at the same time represent other negative ‘displacements’ known to promote self-employment.

Keywords: comparative analysis of economies; cultural economics; entrepreneurship; macro-economic analyses of economic development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L2 M M10 M13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-11-13
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repub.eur.nl/pub/1034/ERS%20081%20Thurik%20et%20al.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:ems:eureri:1034

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePub ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).