Entrepreneurial discrete choice: Modelling decisions between self-employment, employer and worker status. Working paper 15.

This paper estimates an entrepreneurial choice model between different forms of business organisation, focusing on the choice to operate as a sole proprietor operating on own account, or as an employer, rather than as a waged employee. ‘Own account’ was the phrasing used through the censuses of the period we cover: it describes an entrepreneur who operates as self-employed on their own with no employees. A discrete choice decision model is used to estimate probabilities of different choices using the large scale data for England and Wales contained in the ‘British Business Census of Entrepreneurs 1851-1911’ to be deposited at UKDA. This paper uses the data for the later censuses, 1891-1911. This database is one of the outputs of ESRC project ES/M010953 Drivers of Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses’.