Unemployment reduction through solo self-employment: A gender question?

Tina Haussen () and Marcus Schlegel ()
Additional contact information
Tina Haussen: University of Jena
Marcus Schlegel: University of Erfurt

Empirical Economics, 2020, vol. 59, issue 6, No 20, 3085-3105

Abstract: Abstract This paper examines at the macro-level whether changes in solo self-employment rates lead to changes in unemployment rates with a special emphasis on the role of the gender of the solo self-employed. This gender-specific perspective on self-employment is important because gender differences are reflected in the individual motivation to become self-employed, the self-selection into differently productive sectors and in the performance of the businesses founded. To empirically approach the research question, macro-level panel data from 23 OECD countries during the period 1991–2015 are used. Since the relationship between solo self-employment and unemployment is likely reciprocal and dynamic, population-weighted vector autoregressive models are estimated and Granger-causality tests are performed. The econometric results indicate that solo self-employment can create positive (indirect) employment effects in the medium to long term, regardless of gender. However, male solo self-employment affects employment growth somewhat faster than does female solo self-employment.

Keywords: Solo self-employment; Unemployment; Gender; VAR (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J23 J64 L26 L53 M13 O11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00181-019-01754-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:empeco:v:59:y:2020:i:6:d:10.1007_s00181-019-01754-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-019-01754-w

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

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