Choice or necessity : Choix ou nécessité : les immigrants et leurs enfants choisissent-ils le travail autonome pour les mêmes raisons?

Specifically, this study examines whether the effects of three important determinants of self-employment— expected earnings differentials between paid employment and self-employment, difficulties in the labour market, and ethnic enclaves—differ between immigrants and the Canadian-born, between children of immigrants and children of the Canadian-born, and between children of immigrants and their pa [...] The data used in this study are from the 20%-sample micro file of the 1981 Canadian Census of Population and the 20%-sample micro file of the 2006 Canadian Census of Population. [...] Three questions are addressed in the paper: (1) Are “push” and “pull” factors similarly associated with the likelihood of being self-employed among immigrant parents and Canadian- born parents?; (2) Are “push” and “pull” factors similarly associated with the likelihood of being self-employed among the children of immigrants and the children of Canadian-born parents?; and (3) Did immigrants and the [...] To check the sensitivity of the study’s results to the exclusion of these least successful individuals, all subsequent analyses are replicated without the exclusion, and earnings rather than log earnings are used as the dependent variable in the earnings models. [...] To examine the sensitivity of the results to the choice of the exclusion restriction, the number of adults in the household is used as either the alternative exclusion restriction or the additional exclusion restriction, but it is a significant predictor of self-employment only in the models based on 2006 data.