The Persistence of Self-Employment Across Borders: New Evidence on Legal Immigrants to the United States
25 Pages Posted: 23 May 2008
Abstract
Using recently-available data from the New Immigrant Survey, we find that previous self-employment experience in an immigrant's country of origin is an important determinant of their self-employment status in the U.S., increasing the probability of being self-employed by about 7 percent. Our results improve on the previous literature by measuring home-country self-employment directly rather than relying on proxy measures. We find little evidence to suggest that home-country self-employment has a significant effect on U.S. wages in either paid employment or self employment.
Keywords: self-employment, entrepreneurship, New Immigrant Survey
JEL Classification: J61, J21
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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