Volume 35, Number 4 (Fall) 2000
Hout, Michael, and Harvey S. Rosen. 2000. "Self-Employment, Family Background, and Race." Journal of Human Resources 35(4):670-692.
The offspring of self-employed fathers are more likely than others to become self-employed. Thus the historically low rates of self-employment among African-Americans and Latinos may contribute to their low contemporary rates. National data show that African-Americans and Latinos whose fathers were self-employed have lower rates of self-employment than other men whose fathers were not self-employed. Other aspects of family background explain only a small portion of the self-employment gap between African-Americans and native-born white ancestry groups. Male immigrants who have self-employed fathers overseas are no more likely to be self-employed than other immigrants are.
This work began when the authors were visiting scholars at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York. We are grateful for the supportive environment that the foundation provided. We thank Lisa Kahraman for outstanding assistance in preparing the manuscript, and Thomas Dunn, Andrew Greeley, and Marta Tienda for useful comments. Subsequent work has been supported in part by Princeton's Center for Economic Policy Studies and Berkley's Survey Research Center. A version of the paper was presented at the winter meeting of the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association, Duke University, 13-15 March 1999 and distributed as NBER working paper no. 7344. The data are in the public domain. See www.icpsr.umich.edu/contents for instructions on ordering or downloading the data.
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