Entrepreneurship as an employment career path and the role of entrepreneurial well-being

The links between employment and the well-being of people has attracted in recent times the growing interest of researchers in academic, governmental, and non-governmental institutions. A considerable interest has focused on entrepreneurship and the growing number of individuals in self-employment. Entrepreneurial activity has been linked with economic growth and development. Therefore, understanding the how and the why entrepreneurship and well-being are connected has not only value as academic knowledge, but also value for the society and political decision making. Bearing in mind that people have different preferences, and that those preferences can change over time, it is important for research to examine the phenomena over long periods of time. There have been recently repeated calls for alternative examinations of entrepreneurship as a career path (Burton et al., 2016; Sullivan and Al Ariss, 2019) and as an experience over time (Ryff, 2019; Stephan, 2018). This PhD research examines the allocation of time to self-employment and how self-employment experience is associated with facets of well-being over time. This PhD research critically examines the phenomena using data from the United Kingdom's Household Longitudinal Study survey (UKHLS). Using work histories information from Waves 1 to 9 of the UKHLS, I calculate the proportion of individuals' employment time that was allocated to self-employment, compared to the proportion allocated to wage-employment. This method allows the measuring of selfemployment in an alternative way as a continuous employment experience. Using this method, I also investigate how individuals who live or migrate to urban and rural areas allocate time to self-employment, as well as differences between women and men in different age groups. The findings show that self-employment experience affects facets of well-being in a non-monotonic fashion. Moreover, the analysis indicates that these effects not only differ across levels of experience, but also that the effect of self-employment experience differs across the various facets of well-being and between women and men.