The commuting behaviour of self‐employed workers: Evidence for Spain

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to examine the commuting behaviour of self‐employed workers in Spain as well as its relationship with satisfaction with jobs and housing. According to our results although conventional estimations indicate that commuting trips are shorter among the self‐employed, the differences with employees vanish when the potential endogeneity of self‐employment is controlled for. We also show that the job and housing satisfaction levels of the self‐employed are less sensitive to commuting than those of employees, and that in fact no significant effect is observed for relevant segments of the former group, what gives partial support to the theoretical model that we propose where imperfect information problems affect the employees but not the self‐employed.

Commuting and self-employment in Western Europe

“…This difference in commuting does not depend on the country of reference, as we find statistically significant differences in the time devoted to commuting when the analysis is done for groups of countries (Nordic countries, Mediterranean countries, Anglo-Saxon countries, and Continental countries). These results are consistent with the results reported by Gimenez-Nadal, Molina and Velilla (2018a) for the United States, and Albert, Casado-Díaz and Simón (2019) for Spain. Furthermore, the difference in commuting time varies according to the urban characteristics of the areas where workers live, especially for females, as the commuting gap between employees and selfemployed decreases in urban (intermediate) areas, relative to rural areas.…”

“…The main contributions of the paper are twofold. First, we contribute to the scarce literature on the differences in commuting behavior between employees and self-employed workers (van Ommeren and van der Straaten, 2008;Gimenez-Nadal, Molina and Velilla, 2018;Albert, Casado-Díaz and Simón, 2019). Prior research is based on the analysis of single countries, and their conclusions cannot be generalized to other countries.…”

Does Entrepreneurship Make You Happier? A Comparative Analysis between Entrepreneurs and Wage Earners

“…Among the different reasons for this shortfall in research is the scarcity of studies on the subjective well-being of Spanish entrepreneurs [18]. It entails the absence of research dedicated to exploring how sociodemographic factors influence the happiness of these economic agents during the first years of this century [61].…”

Reassessing the commuting penalty for immigrants: new evidence from Spain

“…Dickerson et al 2014;Olsson et al 2013;Wheatley 2014). The very few exceptions are Albert et al (2019) and Simón et al (2020), who show that the satisfaction of immigrants in these domains is comparatively lower, although no evidence is offered for this group as regards the particular impact of commuting on satisfaction. For this reason, the final part of our empirical analysis examines in a novel way whether the impact of commuting on satisfaction differs between immigrants and natives.…”

“…A dummy variable has also been included in the estimation to identify the group each observation belongs to, given that the non-inclusion thereof can lead to biases in the decomposition that take the form of an overvaluation of the component of characteristics and the corresponding undervaluation of the returns component, caused by the omission of specific intercepts for each group(Elder et al 2010). 5 The exclusion of self-employed workers is a relatively frequent decision in this type of analysis to the extent that they have different relative commuting patterns, usually characterized by lower levels of mobility (see, for example,Gimenez-Nadal et al 2018;and Albert et al 2019). 6 One of the limitations of the analysis concerns the relatively small size of the sample of immigrants from advanced countries in the SQLW, which is consistent with the fact that Spain mainly receives immigrants from emerging countries.…”