When Employees Leap to Self-Employment

Sammanfattning: The dissertation studies the determinants of self-employment entry through an economics of entrepreneurship lens, and examines two sources of data: 7 years of employer--employee matched panel data and a laboratory experiment. The results suggest that employees are more likely to take the leap to self-employment when they have their own business idea, and are employed in occupations with high wage variance. These findings, based on randomized experiments, multilevel analysis, data mining, and model building, contribute to research on occupational choice, entrepreneurial decision making, and the mobility process into self-employment.