Being Independent is a Great Thing: Subjective Evaluations of Self-Employment and Hierarchy

By Bruno S. Frey, Matthias Benz. Social Science Research Network, 2008

632 citations recorded by the source corpus.

One can be independent, or subject to decisions made by others. This paper empirically tests whether individuals attach an intrinsic value to the institutional difference between independence and hierarchy. Taking self-employment as an important case of independence, it is shown that the self-employed derive more utility from their work than people employed by an organization, irrespective of income gained or hours worked. This is evidence for procedural utility: people do not only value outcomes, but also the conditions and processes leading to these outcomes.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d61226cf7634b94a0a36bd9c726bd719c9d6622

How researchers see this paper

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In Sociology and Political Science

1. M. van Praag
2. A. van Witteloostuijn
3. J. van der Sluis

Citations in the corpus

• The Social Dimensions of Entrepreneurship (2005, neutral): “Using survey data from the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland, Frey and Benz (2003) argue that the greater independence and autonomy”
• How Satisfied are the Self-Employed? A Life Domain View (2015, neutral): “One common explanation for this is the high degree of autonomy and work satisfaction individuals can derive from self-employment (Benz and Frey, 2008a).”
• Individual responses to firm failure : Appraisals, grief, and the influence of prior failure experience (2014, neutral): “The self-employed have higher procedural utility because being self-employed provides greater independence, self-determination, and freedom (Benz and Frey, 2008).”
• High Performance Workplace Practices and Job Satisfaction: Evidence from Europe (2004, neutral): “Evidence that supports this hypothesis is provided by Frey and Benz (2002), who compare the job-satisfaction of self-employed and dependent employees using data from Germany, Switzerland and the UK.”
• The value of doing what you like: Evidence from the self-employed in 23 countries (2008, neutral): “In general, the results confirm and, at the same time, extend the findings previously reported in the literature for European and North American countries (e.g. Blanchflower, 2000; Benz and Frey, 2008).”
• Public policy to promote entrepreneurship: a call to arms (2016, neutral): “Further, using the unification of East and West Germany as a natural experiment, Benz and Frey (2008b) show that this result is not due to reverse causation (i.”
• Slipping the surly bonds: The value of autonomy in self-employment (2012, neutral): “Using data from 23 OECD countries, Benz and Frey (2008) showed that the self-employed are signi cantly more satis ed with their jobs than employed individuals, and documented that such higher job satisfaction is attributable mainly to the more interesting jobs and greater autonomy that…”