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The NLSY79 is an excellent source of data for conducting research on self-employment and entrepreneurship. The wealth of information available in the survey allows one to build rich empirical models of the entrepreneurial process. Measures of previous wage and salary, self-employment, and unemployment experience can be created, and the NLSY79 contains several uncommon variables, such as those associated with detailed asset categories, family background information, data on criminal activities, Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) scores, and psychological characteristics. Furthermore, a plethora of measures of the dynamics of self-employment may be extracted from the longitudinal data in the survey. For example, measures of transitions to and from self-employment, number of years of self-employment, and whether an individual ever tries self-employment can easily be created. Finally, the returns to self-employment, measured as earnings, job satisfaction, net worth, or other outcomes, can be estimated. Changes over time in labor market status can be used to identify the effects of self-employment, potentially removing biases created by unobserved heterogeneity across individuals. Given these advantages, it is somewhat surprising that more researchers have not used the NLSY79 to study self-employment. In the sections that follow, this article presents estimates of self-employment from the NLSY79, reviews findings from previous studies that used the survey, and discusses some of the merits of the data sets making up the survey.