Immigrant self-employment: Testing hypotheses about the role of origin- and host-country human capital and bonding and bridging social capital

Using large-scale data on immigrants in the Netherlands, the authors tested competing arguments about the role of origin- and host-country human capital and bonding and bridging social capital in immigrants ’ self-employment. When taking job-skill level into account, immigrants with a higher level of origin- and destination-country education are less likely to be self-employed than salary employed. Likewise, the likelihood of self-employment decreases with origin-country work experience but not with host-country work experience. The pre-sumed positive effect of bonding social capital is not found, but this study’s results suggest that immigrants with an access to bridging social capital are more likely to be self-employed than those without such contacts