Hurst and Lusardi (2004) recently challenged the long-standing belief that liquidity constraints are important causal determinants of entry into self-employment. They demonstrate that the oft-cited positive relationship between entry rates and assets is actually unchanging as assets increase...

Only a few large, nationally-representative datasets include information on both the owner and the business. We briefly describe several of the most respected and up-to-date sources of data on entrepreneurs, the self-employed, and small businesses. More information including estimates of recent...

"Using confidential and restricted-access microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau, we find that Asian-owned businesses are 16.9 percent less likely to close, 20.6 percent more likely to have profits of at least $10,000, and 27.2 percent more likely to hire employees than white-owned businesses in...

Nearly a quarter of Mexico's workforce is self employed. In the United States, however, rates of self employment among Mexican Americans are only 6 percent, about half the rate among non-Latino whites. Using data from the Mexican and U.S. population census, we show that neither industrial...

The focus on employer-provided health insurance in the United States may restrict business creation. We address the limited research on the topic of "entrepreneurship lock" by using recent panel data from matched Current Population Surveys. We use difference-indifference models to estimate the...

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...

Immigrants are widely perceived as being highly entrepreneurial and important for economic growth and innovation. This is reflected in immigration policies and many developed countries have created special visas and entry requirements in an attempt to attract immigrant entrepreneurs. Not...

Four decades ago, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan made the argument that the black family "was not strong enough to create those extended clans that elsewhere were most helpful for businessmen and professionals." Using data from the confidential and restricted access Characteristics of...

An important finding in the rapidly growing literature on self-employment is that the probability of self-employment is substantially higher among the children of business owners than among the children of non-business owners. Using data from the confidential and restrictedaccess Characteristics...