Theories of market failures and targeting motivate the promotion of entrepreneurship training programs and generate testable predictions regarding heterogeneous treatment effects from such programs. Using a large randomized evaluation in the United States, we find no strong or lasting effects on...

Theoretical models of entrepreneurship posit that attitudes toward risk, entrepreneurial ability, and preferences for autonomy are central to the individual's decision between self-employment and wage/salary work.  None of the studies in the rapidly growing empirical literature on...

A rapidly growing literature examines the impact of immigrants on the labor market outcomes of native-born Americans.  However, the impact of immigration on natives in entrepreneurship has not been examined, despite the over-representation of immigrants in that sector and theoretical reasons...

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 estimatetheir impacts on the self-employment and employment rates of African-American men. Black...

We show that entrepreneurship rates differ substantially across 60 ethnic and racial groups in the United States.  These differences exist within broad combinations of groups such as Asians and Hispanics, and are almost as great after regression controls, including age, education, immigrant...

We examine trends in entrepreneurship among white and black men from 1910 to 1990 using Census and CPS microdata.  Self-employment rates fell over most of the century and then started to rise after 1970.  For white men, we find that the decline was due to declining rates within industries,...

Using Current Population Survey (CPS) microdata, I examine trends and the causes of the trends from1979 to 1998 in entrepreneurship among several ethnic/racial groups in the United States.  I find rapid growth rates for the number of self-employed blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native...

A large body research shows a positive relationship between wealth andentrepreneurship and interprets the relationship as providing evidence of liquidity constraints.Recently, however, the liquidity constraint interpretation has been challenged because of thefinding that the relationship between...

The “Great Recession†resulted in many business closings and foreclosures, but what effect did ithave on business formation? On the one hand, recessions decrease potential business income andwealth, but on the other hand they restrict opportunities in the wage/salary sector leaving the...

In contrast to the large and rapidly growing literature on IT investments and firm productivity, we know very little about the role of personal computers in business creation.  Using matched data from the 1997-2001 Computer and Internet Usage Supplements to subsequent Outgoing Rotation Group...