  We investigate the influence of an unoccupied band on the transport
properties of a strongly correlated electron system. For that purpose,
additional orbitals are coupled to a Hubbard model via hybridization. The
filling is one electron per site. Depending on the position of the additional
band, both, a metal--to--insulator and an insulator--to--metal transition occur
with increasing hybridization. The latter transition from a Mott insulator into
a metal via ``self--doping'' was recently proposed to explain the low carrier
concentration in $\rm Yb_4As_3$. We suggest a restrictive parameter regime for
this transition making use of exact results in various limits. The predicted
absence of the self--doping transition for nested Fermi surfaces is confirmed
by means of an unrestricted Hartree--Fock approximation and an exact
diagonalization study in one dimension. In the general case metal--insulator
phase diagrams are obtained within the slave--boson mean--field and the
alloy--analog approximation.
