The objective of this research project is to study the causal effect of potential unemployment insurance benefit duration on the actual unemployment duration of unemployed individuals that start a business, their motivation for starting up as well as on objective measures of subsequent startup success. Existing research has neglected the effects of potential benefit duration on self-employment outcomes and only focused on reemployment outcomes. The project will develop a quasi-empirical strategy that deals with the potential bias arising from neglecting the effect from self-employment. To achieve this goal, the project constructs a new dataset that combines survey and administrative social security data in order to produce a new unique dataset of founders that only allows to investigate this question.