A decomposition of the growth in self-employment

F. van Es and Daniel van Vuuren

Applied Economics Letters, 2011, vol. 18, issue 17, 1665-1669

Abstract: We decompose the rise of self-employment in the Netherlands in the period 1992 to 2006. Using Logit estimates we identify the most important determinants of the recent upturn, separately for women and for men. In contrast with findings for the United States, we find that changes in the industrial composition only play a small role. For women, we find that intra-sectoral developments have been important in spurring self-employment. In particular, it has become more common for women to be self-employed in the Trade and Culture sectors. The ageing of society (older people are more often self-employed) is an important cause of the observed increase. This effect is partly compensated by the negative effect of a higher educated labour force. The estimation results imply that both policies to foster self-employment and a socio-cultural trend have been important. We postulate that generic policy effects have been the most important cause of the increase in self-employment. The largest effects were seen just in the last few years of our sample (2004-2006), which appears to be inconsistent with the notion of a longer lasting socio-cultural trend.

Keywords: self-employment; trend; decomposition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article& ... 40C6AD35DC6213A474B5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: A decomposition of the growth in self-employment (2010)
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:taf:apeclt:v:18:y:2011:i:17:p:1665-1669

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEL20

DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2011.558471

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics Letters is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics Letters from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().