Female Entrepreneurship and Marriage: Does Individualism Matter?

Abstract

The findings with regard to the impact of marital status on female entrepreneurs are ambiguous. Using an extensive individual-level data across countries over six time waves from 1981 to 2014, the article explores the role of a cultural trait—individualism—in affecting the relationship between married females and their self-employment rates. Our results show that for less individualistic societies, married females are 4.3% less likely to be self-employed. For highly individualistic societies, married females are 3.9% less likely to be self-employed. So individualism helps by lessening the magnitude by which the probability for a married female to be self-employed goes down. Identification is established via mitigating omitted variable bias, presenting inverse probability weight estimates and, finally, considering instrumental variable estimates. JEL Classification: L26, O11, Z10