Self-employment and the local business cycle

Helena Svaleryd

Small Business Economics, 2015, vol. 44, issue 1, 55-70

Abstract: The business cycle is likely to be of importance for self-employment rates. When the economy is growing, business opportunities open up and encourage the setup of new firms. In downturns, self-employment may be a way to avoid unemployment. The strength of these pull and push factors may depend on the amount of human capital a person has. The findings in this paper show that although the local business cycle is of minor importance for total self-employment rates in Sweden, there are heterogeneous effects across groups. People with higher human capital endowments are more likely to be pulled into self-employment, while those with lower human capital endowments are to a larger extent pushed into self-employment. This pattern is particularly strong for women. The study contributes to our knowledge of how individuals respond to business cycle changes as well as towards understanding why the association between the business cycle and self-employment rates differ across countries. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Self-employment; Local business cycle; Panel data; J21; J24; M13; L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11187-014-9592-2 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Self-employment and the local business cycle (2013)
Working Paper: Self-employment and the local business cycle (2013)
Working Paper: Self-employment and the local business cycle (2013)
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:kap:sbusec:v:44:y:2015:i:1:p:55-70

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-014-9592-2

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().