摘要：Entrepreneurial activity diers substantially across countries. While
cultural dierences have often been proposed as an explanation, mea-
suring a country's cultural characteristics suers from various problems.
In this paper, we test the hypothesis that cultural factors in uence en-
trepreneurial behavior by looking at dierences in self-employment rates
between immigrant groups within the same market. Such an approach
allows holding constant factors such as the institutional and economic en-
vironment. Using U.S. census data for the year 2000, we nd signi cant
dierences in the propensity to become self-employed across immigrants
which is in line with previous ndings. However, previous studies could
not relate self-employment rates in the U.S. to self-employment shares in
the immigrants' home-countries which rejects cultural explanations. We
improve over the existing literature by rst using a more reasonable proxy
for self-employment shares. Second, we additionally account for determi-
nants of self-employment in the immigrants' home countries. Both of these
modi cations reverse the in uence of home-country determinants com-
pared with previous ndings. Once we apply our modi cations, we nd
evidence of a signi cantly positive relationship between self-employment
rates of immigrants in the U.S. and entrepreneurial activity in their re-
spective countries of origin. Our ndings suggest that we cannot reject
culture as a major determinant of entrepreneurial activity.
