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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

self-employment trends, discrimination, American

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Economics

Abstract

The implications of current trends in self-employment are not well understood because the relevant literature is simply not well developed. A good portion of the current literature on self-employment can be found in the Small Business Journal, a recently established publication with a sociological focus. Economic publications on self-employment are much more scarce and tend to be mixtures of observation and preliminary analyzation. A major hindrance to the development of this literature is that there are few standards to guide it. Even the basic definition of self-employment is still debated. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not include owners of incorporated businesses as self-employed; the Current Population Survey (CPS), which is widely used in empirical work, defines both incorporated and unincorporated business owners as self-employed. It seems to be rather subjective as to whether, for example, partners in partnerships classify themselves as self-employed. Although autonomy is usually a factor used to define self-employment, it is up to the researcher to determine if one is “autonomous enough.” This lack of standards leads to data interpretation problems and widely variant results in the literature.

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