Self-employment, entrepreneurship, and the NLSY79

A relatively small, but growing, body of literature uses microdata from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) to study self-employment and entrepreneurship among young adults. The topics covered in these studies include, but are not limited to, the determinants of entrepreneurship, earnings growth among entrepreneurs, the returns to self-employment, the relationship between criminal activities and self-employment, and job satisfaction among the self-employed. The NLSY79 is a nationally representative sample of 12,686 men and women who were between the ages of 14 and 22 when they were first interviewed in 1979.1 Survey respondents were interviewed annually from 1979 to 1994 and biannually starting in 1996. Most previous studies using this survey exclude the sample of 1,280 youths designed to represent the population enlisted in the four branches of the military as of September 30, 1978, but retain the supplemental sample of 5,295 civilian black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged nonblack, nonHispanic youth. The NLSY79 contains a wealth of information on the demographic, economic, family background, educational, and psychological characteristics of respondents. Detailed measures of the group’s labor market and life experiences from early adulthood to the midforties can also be created for survey respondents. The NLSY79 is an excellent source of data for conducting research on self-employment and Robert W. Fairlie is associate professor and director of the M.S. Program in Applied Economics and Finance, Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Cruz, California. E-mail: Researchers have used the rich data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to investigate the relationship between self-employment and various job and earnings outcomes; future inquiry may afford valuable insights into other interesting consequences of self-employment Self-employment, entrepreneurship, and the NLSY79