Title: Who earns more: job creators, solo-entrepreneurs or employees? Empirical evidence from Visegrad countries

Authors: Ondřej Dvouletý; David Anthony Procházka; Marzena Starnawska

Addresses: Department of Entrepreneurship, Faculty of Business Administration, University of Economics, Prague, W. Churchill Sq. 4, 130-67 Prague 3, Czech Republic ' Department of Management, Faculty of Business Administration, University of Economics, Prague, W. Churchill Sq. 4, 130-67 Prague 3, Czech Republic ' Centre for Entrepreneurship, Faculty of Management, University of Warsaw, Szturmowa 1/3, 02-678 Warsaw, Poland

Abstract: One of the most important questions of individuals pursuing entrepreneurship as a career choice is, do entrepreneurs earn more, compared to employees? We aim to contribute to this research by comparing earnings of employees, solo-self-employed and self-employed with employees. We utilise data from the two waves of the European Survey on Working Conditions (2010, 2015) and we focus on Visegrad countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). The analysis is based on OLS approach and nearest neighbour matching approach. Controlling for key individual characteristics, we find positive returns to entrepreneurship. However, we show that the OLS approach over-estimates the size of returns to entrepreneurship, compared to matching approach. We find that self-employed without employees earn on average 6.7% more when compared to employees, and to self-employed with employees even on average 22% more than employees. We also find that job creators earn on average 22% more when compared with solo-self-employed.

Keywords: returns to entrepreneurship; employees; self-employed with employees; solo-self-employed; European Survey on Working Conditions; EWCS; income.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESB.2021.117345

International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 2021 Vol.43 No.4, pp.517 - 530

Received: 20 Dec 2018
Accepted: 17 Feb 2019
Published online: 01 Sep 2021 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article