%T Investigating the Regional Employment Effects of Solo Self-Employed in the Netherlands
%D 2021
%A Max Cornelissen
%L theses_frw3442
%X The solo self-employed pool has increased amongst various European countries during the last two decades and became a considerable large source of income. Although recent empirical research suggests that solo self-employed entries may bring flexible services to incumbent firms, the exact economic impact of the solo self-employed group remains rather unclear. In this study, the overall contribution of the solo self-employed is followed over a period of ten years in which immediate and indirect effects are separated through an Almon polynomial distributed lag model. The results imply that solo self-employed stimulate the competition among incumbent firms rather than offer flexibility to the market. Furthermore, it was found that regional dissimilarities of the employment change induced by solo self-employed entrants could for a large part be clarified by respective differences of the indirect effects. Hence, the way solo self-employed interact with their regional environment plays a crucial role for explaining their influence on regional development. The results indicate that the indirect effects of solo self-employed entrants are more pronounced in agglomerations and the knowledge intensive sector.