Female Self-Employment: Prevalence and Performance Effects of Having a High-Income Spouse

Carl Magnus Bjuggren and Magnus Henrekson ()

No 1200, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: Little is known about self-employment as a career choice for women who marry a high-income spouse. We show that Swedish women who are married to a high-income spouse are, on average, highly educated and more likely to pursue self-employment than those married to a spouse in the middle of the income distribution. Using rich Swedish register data, we compare the likelihood of self-employment before and after marriage for women who marry a spouse in the top 1, 0.5 and 0.1 percent to those who marry a spouse in the middle of the income distribution. The likelihood of entering self-employment increases by 128–176 percent for women who marry a spouse in the top of the income distribution, and the shift into self-employment is associated with a lower income. The effect of marrying a high-income spouse is larger for women than for men.

Keywords: Career choice; Entrepreneurship; Marriage; Self-employment; Women (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J13 J16 J22 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2018-02-12, Revised 2020-11-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-hme and nep-lma
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Related works:
Journal Article: Female self-employment: prevalence and performance effects of having a high-income spouse (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1200

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