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One of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is Decent Work and Economic Growth (SDG 8). While the actions suggested to reach this goal target numerous actors in the labor market, such as entrepreneurs running small and medium-sized enterprises, unemployed people, students and young people, persons with disabilities, children and adults forced to work, and migrant workers, these are not the only important groups to focus on. This paper discusses a group receiving less attention: self-employed workers. Through a review of literature and the legislative framework on the social benefits of self-employment across 31 European countries, challenges to the self-employed achieving decent work are identified. The most prominent challenges are that, in many countries, these workers lack social protection against unemployment or accidents at work and that the conditions for their entitlement to social benefits are more demanding than for employees. These constitute impediments to achieving SDG 8‘s goal of “decent work for all”, and SDG 10′s aim to “reduce inequalities”.

Based on a large, representative German household panel, we investigate to what extent the personality of individuals influences the entry decision into and the exit decision from self-employment. We reveal that some traits, such as openness to experience, extraversion, and risk tolerance affect entry, but different ones, such as agreeableness or different parameter values of risk tolerance, affect exit from self-employment. Only locus of control has a similar influence on the entry and exit decisions. The explanatory power of all observed traits among all observable variables amounts to 30 %, with risk tolerance, locus of control, and openness having the highest explanatory power.

Despite lower incomes, the self-employed consistently report higher satisfaction with their jobs. But are self-employed individuals also happier, more satisfied with their lives as a whole? High job satisfaction might cause them to neglect other important domains of life, such that the fulfilling job crowds out other pleasures, leaving the individual on the whole not happier than others. Moreover, selfemployment is often chosen to escape unemployment, not for the associated autonomy that seems to account for the high job satisfaction. We apply matching estimators that allow us to better take into account the above-mentioned considerations and construct an appropriate control group (in terms of balanced covariates). Using the BHPS dataset that comprises a large nationally representative sample of the British populace, we find that individuals who move from regular employment into self-employment experience an increase in life satisfaction (up to 2 years later), while individuals moving from unemployment to self-employment are not more satisfied than their counterparts moving from unemployment to regular employment. We argue that these groups correspond to \"opportunity\" and \"necessity\" entrepreneurship, respectively. These findings are robust with regard to different measures of subjective well-being as well as choice of matching variables, and also robustness exercises involving \"simulated confounders\".

The job satisfaction of self-employed and paid-employed workers is analyzed using the European Community Household Panel for the EU-15 covering the years 1994—2001. We distinguish between two types of job satisfaction: job satisfaction in terms of type of work and job satisfaction in terms of job security. Findings from our generalized ordered logit regressions indicate that self-employed individuals as compared to paid employees are more likely to be satisfied with their present jobs in terms of type of work and less likely to be satisfied in terms of job security. The findings also provide many insights into the determinants of the two types of job satisfaction for both self-employed and paid-employed workers.

A large literature shows that the self-employed underreport their income to tax authorities. In this paper, we quantify the extent to which the self-employed also systematically underreport their income in U.S. household surveys. We use the Engel curve describing the relationship between income and expenditures of wage and salary workers to infer the actual income, and thus the reporting gap, of the self-employed based on their reported expenditures. On average, the self-employed underreport their income by about 25%. We show that failing to account for such income underreporting leads to biased conclusions in a variety of settings.

We estimate the impacts of the Earned Income Tax Credit on labor supply using local variation in knowledge about the EITC schedule. We proxy for EITC knowledge in a Zip code with the fraction of individuals who manipulate reported self-employment income to maximize their EITC refund. This measure varies significantly across areas. We exploit changes in EITC eligibility at the birth of a child to estimate labor supply effects. Individuals in high-knowledge areas change wage earnings sharply to obtain larger EITC refunds relative to those in low-knowledge areas. These responses come primarily from intensive-margin earnings increases in the phase-in region.

This paper uses social learning theory to examine the influence of parental role models in entrepreneurial families. We distinguish between paternal and maternal role models and investigate how their influence on offsprings' decision to become self-employed is moderated by personality, specifically the offsprings' openness. We use data on 461 alumni from eight German universities. Our results show not only that the presence of a parental role model increases the likelihood that individuals become self-employed, but that the influence of role models also depends on the individual's openness. We discuss the implications of our findings for research on entrepreneurial families, role models, and the psychology of the entrepreneur.

The literature on social capital and entrepreneurship often explores individual benefits of social capital, such as the role of personal networks in promoting self-employment. In this article, we instead examine social capital's public good aspects, arguing that the benefits of social trust and organization memberships accrue not just to the individual but to the community at large. We test these arguments using individual data from the 2000 Census that have been merged with two community surveys, the Social Capital Benchmark Survey and the General Social Survey. We find that individuals in communities with high levels of social trust are more likely to be self-employed compared to individuals in communities with lower levels of social trust. Additionally, membership in organizations connected to the larger community is associated with higher levels of self-employment, but membership in isolated organizations that lack connections to the larger community is associated with lower levels of self-employment. Further analysis suggests that the entrepreneurship-enhancing effects of community social capital are stronger for whites, native-born residents, and long-term community members than for minorities, immigrants, and recent entrants.

Most studies in the economics discourse argue that the impact of self-employment on job satisfaction is mediated by greater procedural freedom and autonomy. Values and personality traits are considered less likely to explain the utility difference between self-employed and salaried workers. Psychology scholars suggest that entrepreneurial satisfaction also depends, at least in part, on specific values and personality traits. Utilising a large dataset derived from the 2006 European Social Survey, this study performs a complementary analysis by taking personality traits, personal values and indicators for workers' autonomy explicitly into account. The empirical findings add further strength to economists' argument that, net of values and personality traits, autonomy and independence are the mechanisms by which self-employment leads to higher levels of job satisfaction. These results hold true for both male and female sub-samples even when a multitude of sociodemographic characteristics, personal values and personality traits are controlled for.

Sociologists have examined gender inequalities across a wide array of social contexts. Yet, questions remain regarding how inequalities arise among autonomous groups pursuing economic goals. In this article, we investigate mixed-sex entrepreneurial teams to unpack the mechanisms by which gender inequality in leadership emerges, despite strong pressures toward merit-based organizing principles. We theorize the potentially competing relationships between merit and gender and explore the contingencies moderating their effects. Drawing on a unique, nationally representative dataset of entrepreneurial teams sampled from the U.S. population in 2005, we use conditional logistic regression to test our hypotheses. We demonstrate that merit's effect becomes much larger when multiple merit-based criteria provide consistent predictions for which team member is superior to others, and when entrepreneurial founders adopt bureaucratic templates to construct new ventures. However, gender stereotypes of leaders pervasively constrain women's access to power positions, and gender's effect intensifies when spousal relationships are involved. Women have reduced chances to be in charge if they co-found new businesses with their husbands, and some family conditions further modify women's chances, such as husbands' employment and the presence of children.