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This paper studies the impacts of social insurance on the decisions of unemployed individuals to start businesses. Exploiting staggered changes in benefit generosity across U.S. states and over time, I find that higher unemployment insurance (UI) benefits both lower the probability that an unemployed person will become self-employed, and also extend the length of time that passes before they make such a transition. The negative effects of UI benefits are concentrated on the formation of unincorporated businesses. Unincorporated businesses created by unemployed people in higher-benefit state-periods tend to be more successful, as measured by profit and survival rate, suggesting that higher benefits mainly screen out the entry of less productive firms. The negative effects are smaller during non-recession periods and in states that offer a Self-Employment Assistance program.

AbstractThere are many financial paths that link different savers who provide funds to different business investors. Path options considered include combinations of corporate and unincorporated businesses, resident and non‐resident savers, debt and equity, and distributed and retained earnings. These different financial paths have different mixes of attributes valuable to savers and investors. As a result, the options are imperfect substitutes. Australian capital income taxation varies across the different financial path options. As a result, effective tax rates and the effects of reforms to company income tax vary across the funding options. Together, the imperfect substitute and different tax treatments reduce the impact of proposed changes in company income taxation on incentives to, and rewards from, business investment.

The authors describe the development of a model for the evaluation of the tax affairs of UK small unincorporated firms (with fewer than 20 employees). After a brief review of the literature relating to small-business taxation, the main parameters of the NatWest/Manchester Business School tax model for unincorporated businesses are established, Subsequently the model is employed to evaluate small-business taxation from two angles. First, the authors offer a post-1999 budget analysis of the impact of taxation on small-business owners and their employees. Second, the authors discuss a set of proposals which have the potential to improve the neutrality of the tax system towards small-business owners' decisions.

We use the 2014 and 2018 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation to map out the prevalence of employee and nonemployee earnings among workers. Employee earnings are from a job or incorporated business, while nonemployee earnings are from an unincorporated business or other work arrangement. We devise a typology of workers based on the composition of their earnings from employee and nonemployee sources; describe workers of each type along dimensions of demographics, financial well-being, and beneficiary status; and use regressions to identify key predictors of earnings' sources.

Self-employed individuals have arguably greater opportunities than wage earners to underreport their incomes. This paper uses recent Swedish income and expenditure data to examine the extent of underreporting of income among self-employed individuals. A key hypothesis is that underreporting of incomes among the self-employed would be visible in the data as "excess food consumption", for a given level of observed income. Our results confirm the underreporting hypothesis. In particular, we estimate that households with at least one self-employed member underreport their total incomes by around 30 percent. Under-reporting appears to be much more prevalent among self-employed people with unincorporated businesses as among those with incorporated businesses.

This article contrasts the sociodemographic characteristics of self-employed women and men in both incorporated and unincorporated businesses. An analysis of 1980 Public Use Microsample (PUMS) data reveals that neither Schumpeter's (1934) "default" theory nor Knight's (1933) "career" theory offers an adequate explanation of women's self-employment. Women's family characteristics, which represent both constraint and choice, are significant predictors of women's self-employment. Human capital characteristics, including education, age, and past work experience are significant predictors of both women's and men's self-employment status. Self-employment is presented as a form of contingent work, which affords women schedule flexibility.