What determines own-account work in Colombia? Some empirical evidence for the years 2010 and 2013

The main objective of this paper is to analyze the effect of education, age, access to ICTs and physical and financial assets, as well as other personal and socio-economic characteristics on the probability of being a formal or informal own-account worker. In order to achieve this purpose, information will be used at the urban level for the twenty-one main cities in Colombia from the Great Integrated Household Survey 2010 (GISH), by the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE) and the Colombian Longitudinal Survey of the University of the Andes 2013 (CLS). Based on these data, models that have a qualitative binomial and multinomial dependent variable are employed, correcting for selection bias. As main results, it was found that physical assets and access to credit have a positive marginal effect on the probability of being an own-account worker. On the other hand, the marginal effect of education was negative; the lower the educational level, the greater the probability of self-employment, especially regarding the informal work.