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Differences in Self-employment Duration by Year of Entry & Pre-entry

November 2016

Working Paper Number:

carra-2016-09

Abstract

Self-employment is associated with entrepreneurship and a motivation to pursue an opportunity. Previous research indicates that people also become self-employed because of limited opportunities in the wage sector. Using a unique set of data that links the American Community Survey to Form 1040 and W-2 records, this paper extends the existing literature by examining self-employment duration for five consecutive entry cohorts, including two cohorts who entered self-employment during the Great Recession. Severely limited labor market opportunities may have driven many in the recession cohorts to enter self-employment, while those entering self-employment during the boom may have been pursuing opportunities under favorable market conditions. To more explicitly test the concept of "necessity" versus "opportunity" self-employment, we also examine the pre-entry wage labor attachment of entrants. Specifically, we ask whether an association exists between wage labor attachment and the duration of self-employment. We also explore whether the demographic/socio-economic characteristics and self-employment exit behavior of the cohorts are different, and if so, how. We find evidence consistent with the existence of "necessity" vs. "opportunity" self-employment types.

Document Tags and Keywords

Keywords Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant keywords.

By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
employ, employed, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, labor, proprietor, longitudinal, recession, employment entrepreneurship, recessionary, opportunity, socioeconomic, earn, filing, employment unemployment, earner, unemployed, cohort

Tags Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at several tasks, including entity tagging.

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:
Internal Revenue Service, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, Social Security, American Community Survey, Social Security Number, W-2, Center for Administrative Records Research

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