The employment dynamics of less-educated men in the United States: The role of self-employment

Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I construct a sample of working-age males and examine the employment dynamics with a particular focus on the role of self-employment for less-educated men in the US. I find that men responding they had at some point been self-employed tend to spend less time in non-employment than other less-educated men. The results from the dynamic multinomial logit model reveal positive aspects of self-employment by indicating that less-educated men who were self-employed in the previous year were less likely to be non-employed in the future as compared to those who were paid workers in the previous year.