Browsing by Author "Carree, Martin"

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    Does Self-Employment Reduce Unemployment?
    (Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam., 2008-11-01T00:00:00Z) Thurik, A. Roy; Carree, Martin; van Stel, André; Audretsch, David B.
    This paper investigates the dynamic relationship between self-employment and unemployment rates. On the one hand, high unemployment rates may lead to start- up activity of self-employed individuals (the “refugee” effect). On the other hand, higher rates of self-employment may indicate increased entrepreneurial activity reducing unemployment in subsequent periods (the “entrepreneurial” effect). This paper introduces a new two-equation vector autoregression model capable of reconciling these ambiguities and estimates it for data from 23 OECD countries between 1974 and 2002. The empirical results confirm the existence of two distinct relationships between unemployment and self-employment: the “refugee” and “entrepreneurial” effects. We also find that the “entrepreneurial” effects are considerably stronger than th
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    The relationship between economic development and business ownership revisited
    (Cranfield University School of Management, 2007-08) Carree, Martin; van Stel, André; Thurik, A. Roy; Wennekers, Sander
    This paper revisits the two-equation model of Carree, van Stel, Thurik and Wennekers (2002) where deviations from the ‘equilibrium’ rate of business ownership play a central role determining both the growth of business ownership and that of economic development. Two extensions of the original setup are addressed: using longer time series of averaged data of 23 OECD countries (up to 2004) we can discriminate between different functional forms of the ‘equilibrium’ rate and we allow for different penalties for being above or under the ‘equilibrium’ rate. The additional data do not provide evidence of a superior statistical fit of a U-shaped ‘equilibrium’ relationship when compared to an L-shaped one. There appears to be a growth penalty for having too few business owners but not so for having too many.