Cross-national Differences in Self-Employment Participation and Earnings

该项目考察了以自营职业为衡量标准的男性和女性在创业方面的跨国差异。该项目调查了妇女更频繁和更有利可图地从事自营职业的背景，并就促进妇女创业的工作与家庭和解政策提供了见解。过去的研究表明，美国女性的自我雇佣在很大程度上是由她们的家庭责任决定的。这项研究试图了解全民公费育儿或全民产假政策是否有助于缩小创业和薪酬方面的性别差距。了解工作-家庭支持可能会鼓励特定形式的女性自主创业，这为如何促进女性创业提供了潜在的变革性理解。本研究采用创新的方法来理解不同福利国家背景下的工作-家庭协调政策如何塑造女性创业。该项目使用了15个西化国家的数据，考察了各国女性在自营职业和工作家庭政策方面的差异。使用来自这些地区的社会政策数据、文化指标和纵向面板数据，该项目部署了事件历史分析、固定效应回归和多水平建模，以估计不包括与自营职业、劳动力参与和收入相关的单个因素的控制的政策影响。这项研究的更广泛影响与了解如何在美国鼓励创业有关，该项目扩大了对导致女性参与自营职业的个人和国家层面因素的科学理解。这个项目对提高美国的经济竞争力有直接的应用。自营职业是美国创造新就业机会的推动力。调查结果将向媒体和学术机构传播。该项目还包括对相关研究生进行广泛的培训，包括先进的数据分析技术。

This project examines cross-national differences in entrepreneurship, among both men and women, as measured by self-employment. The project investigates the contexts where women's self-employment is more frequent and more profitable, and offers insights on the policies for work-family reconciliation that promote female entrepreneurship. Past research shows US women's self-employment is profoundly shaped by their family responsibilities. The research seeks to understand whether policies for universal publicly-funded childcare or universal maternity leave would help to close gender gaps in entrepreneurship and pay. Understanding how work-family supports may encourage specific forms of female self-employment offers a potentially transformative understanding regarding how to promote women's entrepreneurship.This study takes an innovative approach to understanding how work-family reconciliation policies shape women's entrepreneurship across different welfare state contexts. The project uses data from 15 westernized countries to examine differences in women's self-employment and work-family policies cross-nationally. Using social policy data, cultural indicators, and longitudinal panel data from these locales, this project deploys event history analysis, fixed effects regression, and multi-level modeling to estimate policy effects net of controls for individual factors associated with self-employment, labor force participation, and earnings. The study's broader impacts are tied to understanding ways to encourage entrepreneurship in the US, and the project expands the scientific understanding of the individual and national level factors leading to women's engagement in self-employment. This project has direct application for increased economic competitiveness of the US. Self-employment is a driving force behind new job creation in the US. The findings will be disseminated to media as well as scholarly outlets. The project also includes extensive training, including in advanced techniques of data analysis, for involved graduate students.