In the 1980s, many U.S. cities initiated programs reserving a proportion of government contracts for minority-owned businesses. The staggered introduction of these set-aside programs is used to estimate their impacts on the self-employment and employment rates of African-American men. Black...

Employment and hours appear far more cyclical than dictated by the behavior of productivity and consumption. This puzzle has been called “the labor wedge” — a cyclical intratemporal wedge between the marginal product of labor and the marginal rate of substitution of consumption for...

We focus on the intergenerational transmission of the propensity to be self-employed. Our emphasis is on the role of family background, and in particular, on what we call the intergenerational pick-up rate with respect to self-employment, the probability that a person with a self-employed parent...

Previous studies tend to find that immigration has a weak negative effect on the employment and earnings of native-born workers. These studies overlook the effect of immigration on an important sector of the labor force, the self- employed. Anecdotal evidence suggests that immigrants, especially...

The Tax Reform Act of 1986 introduced a new tax subsidy for health insurance purchases by self-employed persons. This paper analyzes the changing patterns of insurance demand before and after this reform to generate new estimates of how the after tax price of insurance affects the discrete...

This paper examines the division of founder shares in entrepreneurial ventures, focusing on the decision of whether or not to divide the shares equally among all founders. To motivate the empirical analysis we develop a simple theory of costly bargaining, where founders trade off the simplicity...

We use an extensive panel of 17 million individuals born between 1947 and 1995 from China's largest online marketplace, Taobao, to study the impact of RAE on the propensity to become an entrepreneur. Using events surrounding the Cultural Revolution and the issuance of the Compulsory Education...