Abstract
This paper explores differences in the likelihood of engaging in self-employment among migrants who moved for different reasons to the UK. The results suggest that, conditional on being in employment, those who initially migrated for asylum reasons are six percentage points more likely to engage in self-employment than the UK-born, while those who migrated for work reasons are not significantly different from UK-born workers in this regard. We also find that mediating factors, such as the presence of networks and years since migration, relate differently to the likelihood of self-employment for each group of migrants. Finally, there are also differences when looking at the number of persons employed by the self-employed and the skill level associated with the activity of self-employment. Those who migrated for asylum are not significantly different from the UK-born in their likelihood of employing someone else, while those who migrated for work are two percentage points less likely to employ others relative to the UK-born.
Highlights
Are migrants more entrepreneurial than the native-born? Are they more likely to be self-employed? These questions have captivated the attention of academics and have become part of a flourishing area of research (Hart and Acs 2011; Jansen et al 2003; Levie and Smallbone 2009; OECD 2010)
Short-term legal restrictions upon arrival for those coming from outside the European Union (EU) for work and study reasons will impact how these individuals interact with the labour market in the short-term and could lead to different employment trajectories in the long term. This leads to our last hypothesis: Hypothesis 4 (H4): The propensity to engage in self-employment will be higher for study and work migrants coming from EU countries than for study and work migrants coming from non-EU countries
Focusing on column 7, which includes the full set of controls, the estimates suggest that the foreignborn are 1.6 percentage points more likely to engage in self-employment than the United Kingdom (UK)-born
Summary
Are migrants more entrepreneurial than the native-born? Are they more likely to be self-employed? These questions have captivated the attention of academics and have become part of a flourishing area of research (Hart and Acs 2011; Jansen et al 2003; Levie and Smallbone 2009; OECD 2010). A number of studies have explored the role of ethnicity in self-employment patterns across subgroups of the population (Clark and Drinkwater 2000, 2010; Clark et al 2017; Levie 2007), and others have looked at the role of the region of origin of the migrants (Andersson and Hammarstedt 2015; Blume et al 2009; Hammarstedt 2004) Our analysis complements these studies and explores whether individuals from the same ethnic group and region of origin who migrated for different reasons have different propensities of engaging in self-employment. We explore the mediating roles of length of residence in the host country and networks of compatriots in determining differences in self-employment rates across the various migrant groups we look at.
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