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Entrepreneurial Spirit and Immigrant Self-employment

This paper investigates the effect of entrepreneurial spirit on immigrant entrepreneurship in the United States. Entrepreneurial spirit refers to attitudes and perceptions towards entrepreneurship, or general self-employment. I address the home country self-employment hypothesis and examine the effect of home country self-employment rates on immigrant self-employment outcomes. I find a negative effect of home country self-employment rates on immigrant self-employment rates and thus, reject the home country self-employment hypothesis. I argue that home country self-employment rates over-estimate entrepreneurial spirit because they are largely driven by the world’s poorest people who are less likely emigrate to the U.S. I address this issue by using immigrants’ home country’s Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEI) as a measure of immigrant entrepreneurial spirit. I find that the GEI has a positive effect on immigrant self-employment rates, and provide evidence that entrepreneurial spirit has a positive effect on immigrant entrepreneurship in the U.S.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:CLAREMONT/oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cmc_theses-3101
Date01 January 2019
CreatorsSandell-Gandara, Alejandro
PublisherScholarship @ Claremont
Source SetsClaremont Colleges
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceCMC Senior Theses
Rights© 2018 Alejandro Sandell-Gandara, default

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