This paper uses NCDS data on individual characteristics to distinguish determinants of entrepreneurial choice, income and job generation. A new model of utility from self‐employment shows that relaxing liquidity constraints could inhibit performance. Empirically, we find that a range of inheritance enhances the performance of the self‐employed and increases self‐employment; while higher education also increases self‐employment income and job creation, but reduces the probability of self‐employment. Combining these choice and performance effects, we find that education has a positive net effect on job creation, as does inheritance up to a certain threshold.

The article makes three contributions to the economics literature on entrepreneurship. We offer a new measure of entrepreneurship which accounts for variations in persistence in self-employment and as a result avoids the weakness of approaches which categorise an individual as an entrepreneur by observing their occupation at just one point in their career. We outline an econometric methodology to account for this approach and find, via a statistical test of model selection, that it is superior to probit/logit models, which have dominated the literature. While our results indicate that this existing literature is good at explaining an individual's propensity to try self-employment, we find that entrepreneurial persistence is determined by a different model and unearth some new insights.Early self-employment encourages entrepreneurial persistence. For men, inheritance encourages persistence, and facilitates initial self-employment. Having a self-employed father as a role model makes sons persist longer. However, somewhat surprisingly, early experience of unemployment does not affect the probability of self-employment, while reducing persistence. The popular 'unemployment push effect' is thus rejected in our sample.

In contrast to previous results combining all ages, we find positive effects of comparison income on happiness for the under 45s and negative effects for those over 45. In the UK, these coefficients are several times the magnitude of own income effects. In West Germany, they cancel out to give no effect of comparison income on life satisfaction in the whole sample when controlling for fixed effects, time-in-panel, and age-groupings. Pooled OLS estimation gives the usual negative comparison effect in the whole sample for both West Germany and the UK. The residual age-happiness relationship is hump-shaped in all three countries. Results are consistent with a simple life cycle model of relative income under uncertainty. Jel codes: D10, I31, J10

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We present results of a negative binomial model on the determinants of the number of days of absence in a given year for a sample of 2049 workers drawn from three factories. We ¢nd evidence of the terms of the remuneration contract being important and we o¡er an interpretation of the di¡erential e¡ect of the company sickpay scheme on the behaviour of workers contracted to work four or ¢ve days a week. " MotivationThe number of days lost due to absence is often taken as an indicator of the e¡ectiveness of the personnel policies in a given ¢rm, and evidence that it occupies the thoughts of personnel managers can be gleaned from an examination of absenteeism surveys by the Confederation of British Industry (1995) in which the main object of attention is the number of days of absence in various industries. Economists also have an interest in the study of absence as it can reveal aspects of the relationship that might exist between workers' behaviour and their contractual arrangements. Personnel managers should also be interested in this relationship as it could inform the design of their personnel policies. In this paper we analyse the e¡ect of a company sickpay scheme which, we argue, will impact di¡erently on workers with di¡erent contracts. á DataThe data are drawn from a manufacturing ¢rm operating production lines (see Barmby et al., 1991. Workers have ¢xed daily hours and weekly days of work, N. Workers are contracted to work either four or ¢ve days