Skills Variety and Self-Employment: The Case of Spain

Abstract

This paper analyses empirically the impact on occupational choice of so called balanced skills, as advanced by Lazear (2004). For this purpose we resort to the contextually rich data collected within the REFLEX survey and study a sample of Spanish university graduates from the year 2000, who were interviewed retrospectively in 2005. Using a logit model we show that higher skills variety is positively related to the probability of self-employment, even after controlling for having followed specific entrepreneurship education courses. Additionally, we show that having changed jobs several times is not a determinant of self-employment as proposed by Silva (2007).

Keywords: balanced skills theory, self-employed, entrepreneurial education