Models of self-employment in a competitive market

In this chapter a survey is given of models in the literature that can be used to explain the number of self-employed individuals in the framework of a competitive market.1 Most of these models were actually developed for other goals. Some of the models discussed were developed to explain the number of firms, the size distribution of firms, or the number of entrepreneurs. Others were developed to explain other phenomena, for example the optimal tax rate, while making the number of self-employed individuals endogenous as an extra complication. For this reason this survey is more than a trivial enumeration of models present in the literature.