Information technology adoption and the growth of nonemployer businesses

Abstract

The growth of nonemployer businesses as a share of the working‐age population has been little studied relative to the decline of employer business rate in the United States. We show that local labor markets specializing in routine task‐intensive jobs have experienced a higher adoption of information technology as well as the growth of nonemployer businesses primarily through increasing self‐employment in nonroutine manual task‐intensive jobs that are less frequently outsourced to business service firms.