Volume 35, Number 4 (Fall) 2000
Fairlie, Robert W., and Bruce D. Meyer. 2000. "Trends in Self-Employment Among White and Black Men During the Twentieth Century." Journal of Human Resources 35(4):643-669.
We examine white and black male nonagricultural self-employment from 1910 to 1997. Self-employment rates fell through 1970 and then rose. White male trends were due to declining rates within industries, ending in 1970, counterbalanced by a continuing shift toward high self-employment industries. Social security and immigration do not explain the recent upturn. Black male rates have been roughly one-third of white rates from 1910 to 1997. Blacks are not concentrated in low self-employment rate industries. Absent continuing forces limiting black self-employment, a simple inter-generational model suggests quick convergence of black and white rates.
Robert W. Fairlie is an associate professor in the department of economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Bruce D. Meyer is a professor in the department of economics at Northwestern University. The authors would like to thank Joseph Altonji, Rebecca Blank, Thomas Dunn, Lori Kletzer, Ivan Light, Rebecca London, and Roger Ransom as well as participants at the 1997 winter meetings of the Econometric Society, the All-UC Group in Economic History Conference at University of California, Davis, the Bay Area Labor Economists Workshop at San Francisco State University, the OECD/CERF/CILN International Conference on Self-Employment, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Northwestern University for their comments. They would also like to thank Steve Anderson, Brian Jenn, Chris Jepsen and Don Rosenbaum for their research assistance. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning May 2001 through April 2004 from Robert W. Fairlie at rfairlie@cats.usc.edu.
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X