Horatio Alger Meets the Mobility Tables

Author(s)/Creator(s)

Douglas Holt-Eakin, Syracuse University
Harvey S. Rosen, Princeton University
Robert Weathers, Syracuse University

Description/Abstract

The question of how entrepreneurship relates to income mobility is cogent given the current public debate about the sources of income inequality and mobility in United States society. We examine how experience with entrepreneurship has affected an individual’s place in the earnings distribution. Our basic tack is to follow individuals’ positions in the income distribution over time, and to see how their mobility (or lack thereof) was affected by involvement with entrepreneurship. Our main finding is that for low-income individuals there is some merit to the notion that the self-employed moved ahead in the earnings distribution relative to those who remained wage earners. On the other hand, for those at the upper end of the earnings distribution, those who became self-employed often advanced less in the earnings distribution than their salaried counterparts.

Document Type

Working Paper

Date

7-1998

Language

English

Series

Income Security Policy Series

Acknowledgements

We thank the Foundation for its support, as well as Princeton’s Center for Economic Policy Studies and Syracuse’s Center for Policy Research.

Disciplines

Economic Policy | Economics | Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration | Public Policy

ISSN

1061 1843

Additional Information

Policy studies paper no.19

Recommended Citation

Holt-Eakin, Douglas; Rosen, Harvey S.; and Weathers, Robert, "Horatio Alger Meets the Mobility Tables" (1998). Center for Policy Research. 397.
https://surface.syr.edu/cpr/397

Source

Local Input

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.