Knowledge that Transforms

Using full-population data from Finland, we show that individuals at the top of the income distribution are significantly more likely to start new incorporated businesses. High-income earners also establish more successful and productive businesses than others. In contrast, parental income is not linked with selection into new entrepreneurship or firm-level outcomes. We find that income gains from entrepreneurship are rather similar across individual and parental characteristics, and that entrepreneurship is associated with upward income mobility regardless of initial income levels. Overall, our findings suggest that entrepreneurship can serve as an upward economic ladder for individuals from diverse backgrounds.

Most studies on the labor market effects of immigration use repeated cross-sectional data to estimate the effects of immigration on regions. This paper shows that such regional effects are composites of effects that address fundamental questions in the immigration debate but remain unidentified with repeated cross-sectional data. We provide a unifying empirical framework that decomposes the regional effects of immigration into their underlying components and show how these are identifiable from data that track workers over time. Our empirical application illustrates that such analysis yields a far more informative picture of immigration's effects on wages, employment, and occupational upgrading.