Using Self-Employment As Proxy For Entrepreneurship: Some Empirical Caveats

Research on entrepreneurship has received an increased amount of interest in recent years, with self-employment being used as the most common proxy for "Entrepreneurship" in empirical studies. However, there are various ways of defining self-employment, making it a somewhat dubious proxy. This may flaw the analysis, especially in cross-country studies, since the documentation of data often is insufficient and difficult to access due to language barriers. The authors present an analysis of Swedish self-employment data. They show that the measurement of self-employment has changed over time to noticeably affect the reported number of self-employed in the two major statistical sources on self-employment. The reported development of self-employment sometimes differs diametrically depending on source.