Proprietorship and unemployment in the United States

•We model the unemployment and proprietorship relationship using a vector autoregressive process.•Unemployment Granger causes proprietorship.•Proprietorship does not Granger cause unemployment.

Unemployment and proprietorship can be related in several ways. As unemployment increases, individuals with fewer job alternatives may choose to start their own business resulting in an increase in proprietorship. Alternatively, if an increase in unemployment is the result of a depressed economy, higher unemployment may lead to less demand for the products and services of proprietors, thus reducing proprietorship. Finally, greater proprietorship may lead to future increases in employment as these businesses grow. This can potentially reduce unemployment in the long run. We apply a panel vector autoregressive model to unemployment and proprietorship data from the U.S. states for the years 1976 to 2009 to examine if these effects are apparent in the data. We find that unemployment Granger causes proprietorship, but proprietorship does not Granger cause unemployment.