Self-employment: microeconometric foundations and experimental evaluation.

Summary Why do some individuals choose self-employment? Existing empirical studies highlight the diversity of determinants of self-employment. In line with this work, the originality of our analysis was to study, using French ECHP data, the extent to which self-employed parents transmit to their children trade-specific skills, but also some non-specific managerial skills. Our results show that having self-employed parents significantly increases the probability of being self-employed, whether or not they are in the same occupation as their child. Other more difficult to measure factors such as attitude towards risk and taste for autonomy also seem to influence the choice of self-employment. The methodology used to understand the effect of these factors is experimental economics. The results obtained show that the self-employed are significantly less risk averse and have a greater taste for autonomy. After studying the determinants of self-employment, the second issue of this thesis was to study the quality of insertion into this type of employment. To do this, we studied the differences in income, salary progression and satisfaction between self-employed workers and employees. The results obtained show that if, all other things being equal, the income of the self-employed does not differ significantly from that of employees, they are significantly more satisfied with their type of activity than the latter.