We study ethnic differences in long-term self-employment in Sweden combining population-wide register data and a unique survey targeting a large representative sample of the total population of long-term self-employed. Using the registers, we analyze the evolution of labor and capital income during the first ten years following self-employment entry.
We find that, while ethnic differences in labor income become smaller over time, ethnic differences in capital income grow stronger during the course of self-employment. These findings are robust to controlling for factors such as organizational form and type of industry. We use the survey data to gain further insights into these differences, and show that immigrant self-employed experience more problems, earn less, but work harder than native self-employed. They also have a less personal relation to their customers, do not enjoy their work as much as natives, and appear to have different perspectives on self-employment in general.
