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The Persistence of Self-Employment Across Borders

Last Updated: March 01, 2009

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The Persistence of Self-Employment Across Borders: New Evidence on Legal Immigrants to the United States by Randall Kekoa Quinones Akee,IZA; David A. Jaeger, College of William and Mary and IZA; Konstantinos Tatsiramos, IZA. 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. Read the article online.

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