Self-employment and Job Generation in Metropolitan Areas, 1969-2009

André van Stel, Martin Carree, Emilio Congregado and Antonio Golpe

No H201306, Scales Research Reports from EIM Business and Policy Research

Abstract: Many regional development policy initiatives assume that entrepreneurial activities promote economic growth. Empirical research has presented rationale for this argument showing that small firms create proportionally more new jobs than large ones. However, little research has been performed on the issue of net job generation at the urban level, particularly when self-employment is considered as an indicator of entrepreneurial activities. This paper investigates to what extent U.S. metropolitan areas in the 1969-2009 period characterized by relatively high rates of self-employment also have shown relatively high rates of subsequent total employment growth. The analysis corrects for the influence of sectoral composition, wage level, educational attainment, presence of research universities and size of the metropolitan area to measure the extent to which the number and quality of self-employed in a region contribute to total employment growth. It finds the relationship between self-employment rates and subsequent total employment growth to be positive on average during the forty-year period but to weaken over time.

Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2013-04-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-geo, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.entrepreneurship-sme.eu/pdf-ez/H201306.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Self-employment and job generation in metropolitan areas, 1969-2009 (2015)
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:eim:papers:h201306

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scales Research Reports from EIM Business and Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Webmaster EIM ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).