Using decomposition analysis, the paper investigates the reasons why Northern England has less but higher perfoming self-employed business than the South. It finds the causes are mainly structural differences rather than due to regional variation in people's characteristics..

The paper makes three contributions to the economics literature on entrepreneurship. We offer a new measure of entrepreneurship which accounts for variations in persistence in self-employment. We outline an econometric methodology to account for this approach and find that it is superior to...