Starting a business doesn’t make most people rich, but it makes plenty of people happy.

Despite dismal failure rates, long hours, low income, high stress levels and a host of other problems, entrepreneurs report consistently higher rates of happiness than wage-earning employees. All of those problems do take away from entrepreneurs’ happiness, of course—but the positives of running a business are so strong that they outweigh the negatives. If you look at the data, it turns out that entrepreneurs on average earn less money than a typical employed person work 13 hours more a week and reported it’s a very stressful occupation, says Boris Nikolayev, Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Despite that, there’s overwhelming evidence in the literature that entrepreneurs report significantly higher levels of job satisfaction.

That’s the big picture and it’s an important one, but look deeper, and the picture gets more nuanced, and more interesting. Research reveals what specifically brings happiness to entrepreneurs and what doesn’t. It shows what types of entrepreneurs are happy, and it shows that the ingredients of happiness differ for men and women and more. Here are some of the highlights from the research.