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

Randall Akee, David Jaeger and Konstantinos Tatsiramos

Economics Bulletin, 2013, vol. 33, issue 1, 126-137

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 self-employment status in the U.S., increasing the probability of being self-employed by about 7 percent relative to an unconditional self-employment probability of about 10 percent. This effect is statistically significant and quantitatively important, being equivalent to at least 7 years of U.S.-based education. Our results improve on the previous literature by measuring home-country self-employment directly rather than relying on proxy measures.

Keywords: Self-employment; entrepreneurship; New Immigrant Survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J2 J6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-01-14
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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