Abramowitz 2016 HRS Self-employment Roles

This data file contains a hand-coded classification of self-employment roles for 2016 HRS respondents reporting self-employment as their current main employment and providing narrative descriptions of their work in answer to the interview questions PJ166M: “What industry do you work in? That is, what does your company do or make?” and PJ168M: “What sort of work do you do?”. The approach classifies the self-employment reports into three entrepreneurial roles (own/run; manage; independent) along the lines of Light and Munk (2018). Jobs are classified as “own/run” when a respondent explicitly claimed to own the business by using such terms as own, co-own, owner, proprietor, president, or chief executive officer (CEO) or to run the business by using such terms as director, officer, or I run the business. Jobs are classified as “manage” when a respondent explicitly claimed a managerial or executive role by using such terms as boss, manager, supervisor, executive, chief financial officer (CFO), or vice president. Jobs are classified as “independent” when a respondent did not express owning or managing a business or managing people (all other cases).

Contributed projects based on HRS public data are provided by researchers who want to share their work with the research community. Researchers interested in contributing their own products are invited to contact us at hrsquestions@umich.edu. HRS does not produce or support these products and is not responsible for their content or use. They are provided here as a service to the research community.