Self-employment and entrepreneurship in urban and rural labour markets
研究了英国城乡地区自雇与创业（企业创建和创新）的关系，发现城市中自雇与创业高度相关，而农村中这种关联较弱，但考虑当地劳动力市场条件后差异消失。
We study the link between self-employment and some salient aspects of entrepreneurship – namely business creation and innovation – in urban and rural labour markets. In order to do so, we combine individual and firm-level data for Britain aggregated at the Travel-to-Work Area level. We find that a higher incidence of self-employment positively and strongly correlates with business creation and innovation in urban areas, but not in rural areas. We also document that more rural than urban workers become self-employed in areas with comparably poor labour market opportunities, although this heterogeneity is not evident when focussing on entrepreneurship. Finally, we show that the misalignment between self-employment and our proxies for entrepreneurship in rural areas disappears once we account for local labour market conditions. Our results suggest that self-employment, business creation and innovation are well lined-up in urban areas because they capture the same economic phenomenon – namely, genuine entrepreneurship. This is not the case for rural areas.