Unpredictably Stable: An Investigation into the Stayer-Mover Tendencies

Does entrepreneurship lower individuals? employment turnover rates? The paper offers two reasons why this is the case - a matching mechanism and a lock-in effect. The paper offers theoretical justifications and seeks to empirically disentangle the two mechanisms. A matched employer-employee data covering the entire Danish labor force warrants the identification of a matched sample of entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs useful for rigorous analysis. The analysis reveals that self-employed stay longer in their employment status compared to individuals in paid-employment. This is
shown to be likely due to reduced attractiveness in the wage sector and sunk costs related lock-in effects. Results, however, also indicate that entrepreneurship may resolve mismatches of individuals in the labor market. This counterintuitive finding - self-employment yields greater employment stability - has fundamental implications for the understanding of the returns (labor market outcomes) to entrepreneurship.