Abstract:
The economic integration of immigrants has become a challenging topic
in the European political agenda. This is especially true for countries
that are struggling to survive the economic recession which started in
2008. In this context, entrepreneurship emerges as an alternative to
unemployment. While the self-employment propensity of immigrants
is well documented, little is known about the performance of these
ventures. This article contributes to the literature by comparing and
explaining the differential earnings of self-employed versus salaried
immigrants in Spain. A binary logistic regression is applied to explore
data collected by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor project for 2005
and 2006. Our findings show that self-employed immigrants’ income
exceeds that of salaried workers. Human capital and location-related
environmental variables were found to be the best predictors of both
self-employed and salaried immigrants’ earnings.
