题目：Motherhood, Migration, and Self-Employment of College Graduates

作者：Zhengyu Cai (蔡郑宇), Heather M. Stephens, John V. Winters

摘要：Female self-employment has received increasing attention from both academic researchers and the popular media. Women face unique challenges in starting and running their own businesses, which may contribute to lower self-employment rates compared to men. Women may also have differing motives for pursuing self-employment. Previous research suggests that married women with families especially value the flexibility that self-employment can offer them. At the same time, college graduates tend to have more successful businesses compared to their less educated counterparts. Thus, we focus on the self-employment outcomes of married mothers who are college graduates. Such women may choose to become self-employed in order to work a more flexible schedule or fewer hours, allowing them to balance their family responsibilities with their career aspirations. Access to childcare is an additional factor that may affect their labor force decisions. Since one potential source of childcare is the proximity to extended family, we use American Community Survey microdata to examine how birth-state residence for college graduate married mothers relates to self-employment and hours worked. Our results support our hypothesis that flexibility in hours worked is a major factor pulling out-migrant college-educated mothers into self-employment, perhaps due to being away from family who could provide childcare. Additionally, it appears that in response to fewer childcare options, self-employed mothers residing outside their birth-state work fewer hours in their businesses. Conversely, self-employed mothers residing in their birth state are able to work more hours per week.