salary, employmentIn the paper “Does Entrepreneurship Pay? An Empirical Analysis of the Returns to Self-Employment”, Hamilton notes that entrepreneurs “have both lower initial earnings and lower earnings growth than in paid employment, implying a median earnings differential of 35 percent for individuals in business for 10 years”.
My question is whether the returns to entrepreneurship have declined over time (compared to paid employment)?
Does anyone have any trend data on this?
I’ve tried both Google Scholar and looking at citations for Hamilton’s paper with no luck.
Entrepreneurship is not employment, and as such, any attempt to compare the two will result in analysis that’s invalid. For example, by default entrepreneurs have equity, employees do not.
I don’t have trend data on exactly this subject (i.e. “returns to entrepreneurship”) but my intuition suggests that there may be some truth to Hamilton’s claim, if only for the fact that the term “entrepreneurship” now includes app developers, for example.
And for that, just search for terms like “How Much Do Average Apps Make?” etc.
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