Heterogeneous self-employment and satisfaction in Latin America

Aguilar, Alexandra Cortés; Muñoz, Teresa María García; Moro‐Egido, Ana I.

doi:10.1016/j.joep.2013.07.001

Cited by 35 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 85 publications

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“…Indeed, in the absence of unemployment benefits, workers have no choice but to work, even if they have to do it informally-in particular, when the fraction of non-labor income is small, as it is in Ecuador. Nonetheless, as noted by Cortés Aguilar et al (2013), at least in Latin American countries, the categories of informality and self-employment are too broad to be conclusive. Indeed, when looking at the determinants of self-employment one notices that high-skilled workers, proxied by educational level, are 12% more likely to be self-employed than those without formal education.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Informality and poverty in Ecuador

Canelas

2018

Small Bus Econ

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This paper uses national representative data from the Ecuadorian Family Expenditure survey to study the determinants of poverty and informality in the country, taking into account the two-way relationship between these two phenomena. The main contribution of this paper is to present new empirical evidence on this relationship for a developing country where more than 60% of workers are in the informal sector. The results support the view of a heterogeneous informal market, in which informal work is both a demand-led phenomenon and a voluntary and primarily supply-led form of employment.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Informality and poverty in Ecuador

Canelas

2018

Small Bus Econ

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“…Tucker, 1988;Parker, 2008;de Mel et al, 2010) also report no significant effect of risk attitudes on the possibility of self-employment. One explanation for the inconsistent findings is that previous studies examine different subgroups of entrepreneurs (Aguilar et al, 2013). If risk preferences are heterogeneous across subgroups, we may not be able to justify any general conclusion regarding the relationship between risk attitudes and entrepreneurship as a whole.…”

mentioning

confidence: 79%

“…We define entrepreneurs as those who lie in the last three categories. In accordance with the existing literature (Djankov et al, 2006;Aguilar et al, 2013), we further define a necessity entrepreneur as an own-account not affect the national representativeness of the survey. 9 We limit the analysis to non-agricultural activities and drop from the model those farmers who were selfemployed in agriculture.…”

Section: Data and Main Variablesmentioning

confidence: 91%

Risk Attitudes and Self‐employment in China

2014

China and World Economy

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Using the 2006 wave of the Chinese General Social Survey, the present paper examines the effect of risk attitudes on the likelihood of entrepreneurship in China. Our results show that risk attitudes have a nonlinear effect on the likelihood of being entrepreneurs. Risk neutral people are most likely to be entrepreneurs, while both risk averse and risk seeking people prefer to work for wages. When we further divide entrepreneurs into necessity and opportunity entrepreneurs, we find only a marginal difference in risk attitudes between wage workers and necessity entrepreneurs, while less risk averse individuals tend to be opportunity entrepreneurs. Our results have important policy implications for the government's efforts to promote entrepreneurial activities. Caliendo et al., 2009; Dohmen et al., 2011). 2 To the best of our knowledge, there exist few studies (e.g. Djankov et al., 2006;Yueh, 2009;de Mel et al., 2010) regarding the impact of risk attitudes on the choice of self-employment in developing countries. One reason may be the lack of good-quality data on individual risk attitudes in developing countries. Nevertheless, risk attitudes may play a much larger role in entrepreneurship in developing countries as a result of the instability of political and economic environments and imperfect markets (de Mel et al., 2010).Although there is general agreement in the existing literature that there is a negative relationship between risk aversion and self-employment, some studies (e.g. Tucker, 1988;Parker, 2008;de Mel et al., 2010) also report no significant effect of risk attitudes on the possibility of self-employment. One explanation for the inconsistent findings is that previous studies examine different subgroups of entrepreneurs (Aguilar et al., 2013). If risk preferences are heterogeneous across subgroups, we may not be able to justify any general conclusion regarding the relationship between risk attitudes and entrepreneurship as a whole. 3 Another possibility is that the existing literature only pays attention to the linear risk attitudes effect. This practice might be problematic because personality traits including risk attitudes can have a nonlinear effect on labor market outcomes (Heckman and Kautz, 2012). 4 As the largest developing country in the world, China is an ideal case to study the

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“…In contrast, while mixed, the evidence from Latin America seems to suggest that the self-employed are less satisfied with their lives and jobs, due to the precarious nature of self-employment in the regionself-employment there is more likely to be involuntary and in the informal sector (Graham and Pettinato 2002;Graham and Felton 2006). Indeed, of the self-employed in Latin America, only business owners are more satisfied with their lives, incomes, and jobs, while the self-employed in more precarious occupations, such as farmers, fishermen, and informal employees, are less satisfied than the average (Aguilar et al 2013).…”

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confidence: 99%

Employment, late-life work, retirement, and well-being in Europe and the United States

Nikolova

Graham

2014

IZA J Labor Stud

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Flexible work arrangements and retirement options provide one solution for the challenges of unemployment and underemployment, aging populations, and unsustainable public pension systems in welfare states around the world. We examine the relationships between well-being and job satisfaction on the one hand and employment status and retirement, on the other, using Gallup World Poll data for several European countries and the United States. We find that voluntary part-time workers are happier, experience less stress and anger, and have higher job satisfaction than other employees. Using statistical matching, we show that late-life workers under voluntary part-time or full-time arrangements have higher well-being than retirees. There is no well-being premium for involuntary late-life work and self-employment compared to retirement, however. Our findings inform ongoing debates about the optimal retirement age and the fiscal burdens of public pension systems.

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Heterogeneous self-employment and satisfaction in Latin America

Cited by 35 publications

References 85 publications

Informality and poverty in Ecuador

Informality and poverty in Ecuador

Risk Attitudes and Self‐employment in China

Employment, late-life work, retirement, and well-being in Europe and the United States

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