Liberalizing Home-Based Business

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Agarwal, Sumit; Sing, Tien Foo; Song, Changcheng; Zhang, Jian
• 署名单位: National University of Singapore; National University of Singapore; Singapore Management University; University of Hong Kong
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2021.04232
• 发表日期: 2024
• 关键词: Entrepreneurship; home-based business; experimentation

摘要

Working at home benefits entrepreneurs by lowering fixed costs and allowing them to engage in joint market and household production. We evaluate a large-scale reform in Singapore, the Home Office Scheme, that allowed business creation at one's residential property and study whether home-based entrepreneurship spurs entrepreneurial activities. The difference-in-differences estimate shows that the reform led to a significantly higher level of business creation and the firms newly created in response to the reform had a higher survival rate. The effect is more pronounced for low-income female individuals and industries with high start-up capital, implying that financial constraints and nonpecuniary benefits likely drive the effect. The reform also encourages entrepreneurs to become serial entrepreneurs, and they open a larger business with a similar survival rate for their second firm. Overall, our findings suggest that the program effectively attracted more entry into self-employment without significantly lowering the average quality of the pool.