Comovement between self-employment and macroeconomic variables : evidence from Spain

Abstract

The relationship between self-employment and certain macroeconomic variables is often at the heart of the debate about the contributions of self-employment to employment and economic growth; examining this relationship is the aim of this article. This article is devoted to the empirical exploration of the comovement and causality between entrepreneurship and economic performance in both directions. This study searches for basic relationships between self-employment and certain macroeconomic variables in Spain using quarterly data from 1980:1 to 2009:4. From this analysis, four key findings emerge: (a) the relation between self-employment and the business cycle differs across two components of self-employment, that is, employers and own-account workers; (b) the existence of a strong bidirectional causality between self-employment and unemployment and GDP; (c) business cycles contain information valuable for predicting today’s employers; and (d) entrepreneurship promotion policies oriented to encourage the emergence of new job creators may be a cornerstone of a new strategy to combat unemployment. These results should be kept in mind when designing entrepreneurship policies.