The persistence of self-employment across borders: New evidence on legal immigrants to the United States

Abstract

Using recently-available data from the New Immigrant Survey, we find that previous self-employment experience in an immigrant's country of origin is an important determinant of self-employment status in the U.S.. increasing the probability of being self-employed by about 7 percent relative to an unconditional self-employment probability of about 10 percent. This effect is statistically significant and quantitatively important, being equivalent to at least 7 years of U.S.-based education. Our results improve on the previous literature by measuring home-country self-employment directly rather than relying on proxy measures.