Do Husbands Matter? Married Women Entering Self-Employment

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of a husband's self-employment experience on the probability that his wife will enter self-employment. Results suggest that having a husband with some exposure to self-employment nearly doubles the probability that a woman will become self-employed, all else equal. Further, the effect is found to be strongest if a woman's husband is actually self-employed at the time she is contemplating a transition. Having a husband with prior self-employment experience also has an important yet quantitatively smaller effect. A series of robustness checks suggest that family businesses and assortative mating only partially explain this large effect. Intrahousehold transfers of human (and, to a much lesser degree, financial) capital might also play a role.