Entrepreneurship and survival dynamics of immigrants to the U.S. and their descendants

Many studies have explored the determinants of entering into entrepreneurship and the differences in self-employment rates across racial and ethnic groups. However, very little is known about the survival in entrepreneurship of immigrants to the U.S. and their descendants. We adopt a modeling framework based on duration analysis, which takes into account both the fact that the stock of entrepreneurs initially observed represents a selected sample and the inability of observing in the data the exit time for some spells. Unlike previous studies, we find a lower survival probability in entrepreneurship for Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants, which does not carry on to their U.S.-born descendants. We also find that these two immigrant groups tend to enter entrepreneurship from unemployment or inactivity and they are more likely to exit towards employment in the wage sector, suggesting that entrepreneurship represents for them an intermediate step from non-employment to paid employment.