Tag Archives | Human Capital

Linking Self-Employment Before and After Migration: Migrant Selection and Human Capital

Andrey Tibajev

Sociological Science, November 20, 2019
10.15195/v6.a23


In linking self-employment before and after migration, the often-cited home-country self-employment hypothesis states that immigrants who come from countries with large self-employment sectors are themselves more likely to have been self-employed and hence have a higher propensity for self-employment in their destination country. Using Swedish data, this study shows that the first part of the hypothesis, that origin-country average rates of self-employment can be used to approximate individual experience, is false; but the second part, the connection between self-employment before and after migration, is true if the measurement is done on the individual level. Migrants who have been self-employed before migration accumulate entrepreneurial human capital, making future self-employment a more desirable labor market alternative vis-à-vis wage employment. But because of migrant selection, this association cannot be captured by aggregate measures, and this is the reason why the home-country self-employment hypothesis, although intuitive, has underperformed in previous empirical tests.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Andrey Tibajev: Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society, Linköping University
E-mail: andti116@student.liu.se

Acknowledgements: I am grateful for insightful comments from Moa Bursell, Martin Hällsten, Karin Krifors, Olav Nygård, Ognjen Obucina and Zoran Slavnic as well as the conference participants of the European Consortium for Sociological Research Annual Conference in Paris and International Migration, Integration, and Social Cohesion Annual Conference in Barcelona.

  • Citation: Tibajev, Andrey. 2019. “Linking Self-Employment Before and After Migration: Migrant Selection and Human Capital.” Sociological Science 6: 609-634.
  • Received: October 7, 2019
  • Accepted: October 16, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a23


0
SiteLock