Self‐employment, Internal Migration and Place Embeddedness

Abstract

Little is known about the individual location behaviour of self‐employed entrepreneurs. Population geography has not researched this issue and entrepreneurship literature has given it little attention. This paper examines whether self‐employed entrepreneurs are ‘rooted’ in place and also whether those who are more rooted in place are more likely to enter self‐employment, thereby shedding new light onto the place embeddedness of self‐employment. Drawing on data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel Study (SOEP) 1996–2009 it shows that self‐employed entrepreneurs as compared with employees are not more rooted in place and that those who are more rooted in place are not more likely to become self‐employed. In contrast to expectations drawn from previous literature, flows into self‐employment are positively associated with inter‐regional moves. The only finding that supports the assumption of ‘place inertia’ of entrepreneurship is that starting a business is less likely to be linked with internal migration than job changes in the wage and salary sector. It concludes that mobility and immobility and individual and household constraints and preferences are important for understanding those who become self‐employed. At the same time, the people–place relations of self‐employment are important to understand migration and the functioning of labour markets. More generally, this paper underpins the importance of demographic phenomena for economic outcomes and thus the need for population geography to engage with other disciplines, in this case economic geography and entrepreneurship research. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Interregional migration of business owners: who moves and how does moving affect firm performance?

“…We thus propose that firm relocation processes and migration of business owners can be intimately linked. Existing work on both firm relocation and migration has not extensively addressed their reciprocal roles as the two literatures have developed largely in isolation (Reuschke, 2014). In this study, we take migration of business owners as the starting point as we are interested in the characteristics of moving business owners and how moving affects firm performance.…”

“…With its focus on migration of the business owners, this study is one of the first to acknowledge the possible relationship between personal considerations of the business owner and consequent migration decisions and firm-level relocation patterns. Particularly given the fact that most firms are smalland increasingly sopersonal locational preferences of the owner and, if present, the partner may be salient factors in determining the preferred business location (Koster & Venhorst, 2014;Reuschke, 2014;Stam, 2007). Such factors may include access to alternative labour market opportunities and residential preferences that are based on access to certain amenities.…”

Housing Assets and Small Business Investment: Exploring Links for Theory and Policy

“…Studies also found a positive association of self-employment and moves which could mean that there is a connection between house sales and running one's own business (REUSCHKE, 2013;BÖHEIM and TAYLOR, 1999;FIELDING 1992).…”

The role of local embeddedness and non-local knowledge in entrepreneurial activity

“…Individuals often have histories of spatial relocation in their pre-entry careers through which they accumulate the experience and knowledge necessary to start a firm (Harrison et al 2004;Reuschke 2014). Knowledge acquisition across different geographical settings may turn these individuals into the most promising entrepreneurs (Dahl and Sorenson 2012;Frederiksen et al 2016).…”