The Role of Wealth in the Start-Up Decision of New Self-Employed: Evidence from a Pension Policy Reform

We study whether wealth affects transitions from wage-employment to self-employment using a large sample from administrative panel data for the Netherlands. To isolate the causal effect of wealth, we rely on a reform of the pension system that abolished preferential tax treatment of early retirement for cohorts born after January 1, 1950. This exogenous reduction in pension wealth has a significant negative effect on the transition into self-employment. We compute that the average reduction of net future pension wealth by 16,000 euros in our sample, triggered by the reform, reduces the transition rate into self-employment by 38%.