Not all paths lead to Rome: Self-employment, wellness beliefs, and well-being

Entrepreneurship research in recent years has developed a meaningful understanding of well-being among self-employed individuals. Moving from the direct and conditional association between self-employment and well-being, we propose a moderated-mediation model based on the mediating effects of wellness beliefs. Wellness beliefs could be an important channel to explaining variations in subjective well-being among the self-employed. The mediation effects of wellness beliefs are conditional on two main demographic factors—gender and ethnicity—widely studied in the entrepreneurship literature. Based on a sample of 5822 participants (5208 employed and 614 self-employed) from the 2015 National Health Attitude Survey we find that wellness beliefs are an important mediator in realizing higher subjective well-being from self-employment, however, the strength of the mediation does not vary by white vs. non-white, however, there is marginal support for differences in strength of mediation for males relative to females. The effect sizes are small. Our findings unpack the self-employment and well-being association and highlight the important role of wellness beliefs.