Returns to Micro-Entrepreneurship in an Emerging Economy: A Quantile Study of Entrepreneurial Indonesian Households' Welfare

Presenting low individual returns, but providing households with livelihoods and means to cope with economic vulnerability, micro-entrepreneurship's evaluation should include both context and heterogeneity. Using a four-wave panel of 9,157 Indonesian households, this study proposes a quantile estimation of micro-entrepreneurship's effects on four household-level complementary measures of welfare - income, consumption, household, and total assets. It evidences substantial positive but decreasing effects on the four measures, with the highest relative returns for the poorest. For this category, micro-entrepreneurship primarily provides returns in the form of income, translating into higher relative consumption, but more importantly, into a greater relative assets accumulation.