Over the past half-century, while self-employment has consistently accounted for around one in ten of the United States workforce, its composition has changed. Since 1970, industries with high startup capital requirements have declined from 53% of self-employment to 23%. This same time period...

n this paper I examine changes in self-employment that have occurred since the early 1980s in the United States. It is a companion paper to a recent equivalent paper that related to the UK. Data on random samples of approximately twenty million US workers are examined taken from the Basic...

Small business owners and others in self-employment have the option to transition to paid work. If there is initial uncertainty about entrepreneurial earnings, this option increases the expected lifetime value of self-employment relative to pay in a single year. This paper first documents that...

Do potential entrepreneurs remain in wage employment because of concerns that they will face worse job opportunities should their entrepreneurial ventures fail? Using a Canadian reform that extended job-protected leave to one year for women giving birth after a cutoff date, we study whether the...

We study the descriptive and substantive representation of workers through worker representatives, focusing on the selection of German works council representatives and their impact on worker outcomes. Becoming a professional representative leads to substantial wage gains for the elected,...

A proposed explanation for why business creation is often found to increase in recessions is that there are two components to entrepreneurship - "opportunity" and "necessity" - the latter of which is mostly counter-cyclical. Although there is some agreement on the conceptual distinction between...

We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied zone to prevent expropriation. We show that the regional location decisions...

This paper presents a multi-district model that can be calibrated to data reflecting housing market conditions, public school finance mechanisms and private school markets. Simulations are undertaken to investigate the impact of private school vouchers. Households that differ in both their...

Local policies can have substantial spillovers both across geographies and markets. Little is known about the impact of public health regulations across administrative borders. We estimate U.S. county level direct and spillover effects of Stay-at-Home-Orders (SHOs) aimed at containing the spread...

Do urban children live more segregated lives than urban adults? Using cellphone location data and following the 'experienced isolation' methodology of Athey et al. (2021), we compare the isolation of students over the age of 16--who we identify based on their time spent at a high school--and...