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Abstract
Supporters claim that entrepreneurship is critical to building and sustaining the regional
economies of urban and rural areas across the nation. Proponents argue that economic
development practices that enhance and support entrepreneurship are essential because they
cultivate innovation which, in turn, creates new jobs, new wealth, and a better quality of life.
However, South Carolina’s real self-employed per capita income has decreased over the last
decade. This downward trend highlights the need to examine the drivers of entrepreneurial
income. The income of self-employed workers, as opposed to the number of self-employed, is
critical to economic development because a major goal of economic policy is to increase
incomes not just employment. Identifying and quantifying the personal, cultural, and economic
factors that influence self-employed income provides policy makers with another tool to enhance
economic development policies. This study uses data from the American Community Survey for
South Carolina in both an ordinary regression approach and a quantile regression approach to
investigate the relationship between individual entrepreneurial income and individual personal
attributes, social/institutional assets available to the entrepreneur, and the regional economic
environment the entrepreneur operates within. Personal attributes, such as education and sex,
and the importance of self-employed income to total family income are significant variables in
explaining income variation among self-employed individuals.