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Purpose — It is known that the self-employed are generally more satisfied than salaried workers. The aim of this paper is to test whether this phenomenon is particularly found for the first-generation self-employed. Design/methodology/approach — French and British panel data are analysed, which include information on various measures of job satisfaction, and the respondent's parents' occupation. Job satisfaction regressions were run in which the first-and second-generation self-employed were distinguished between. Findings — The study finds that first-generation self-employed (those whose parents were not. self-employed) are more satisfied overall than are the second-generation self-employed. The findings are consistent between the British and French data. Research limitations/implications — While the results are the same in the two countries considered, further validation work should extend the analysis across countries. While the authors are fairly sure that the second-generation self-employed do worse, they cannot precisely distinguish between comparison to one's parents, constrained occupational choice, and selection effects due to lower barriers to self-employment entry. Originality/value — The authors believe that this is one of the first papers to distinguish between types of self-employed in terms of their higher satisfaction. The finding that parents' labour force status continues to have a significant impact on their children's job satisfaction argues for a more systematic consideration of intergenerational factors in the analysis of labour markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This article presents an estimation of the incidence and the impact on wages of employer provided training in two countries with different legal systems concerning this type of vocational training, France and Britain. A selectivity bias correction method is used to estimate the real impact of training on wages. This shows that, if the selection in training processes are quite similar in the two countries according to the statistically observable characteristics, this is not the case according to statistically non observable characteristics. Our results show that the "less efficient" workers (level of education, seniority, experience, firm size . . . being equal) are more likely to be trained by their employers in France, which does not seem to be the case in Britain. We explain this result by the fact that the two countries have a different legal system concerning employer provided training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]