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.