This paper analyzes the role of liquidity constraints in the formation of new entrepreneurial enterprises. The basic empirical strategy is to determine whether an individual's wealth affects the probability of becoming an entrepreneur, and the conditional amounts of depreciable assets, ceteris...

Much recent work in strategy and popular discussion suggests that an excessive focus on "managing the numbers" --delivering quarterly earnings at the expense of longer term investments--makes it difficult for firms to make the investments necessary to build competitive advantage. "Short termism"...

Because firms invest heavily in R&D, software, brands, and other intangible assets—at a rate close to that of tangible assets—changes in measured GDP, which does not include all intangible investments, understate the actual changes in total output. If changes in the labor input are more...

Slave property rights yielded a source of collateral as well as a coerced labor force. Using data from Dun and Bradstreet linked to the 1860 census and slave schedules in Maryland, we find that slaveowners were more likely to start businesses prior to the uncompensated 1864 emancipation, even...

Earnings are the flow of value created by corporations. I concentrate on the concept called EBITDA earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. This measure captures the results of the substantive non-financial activities of corporations and corresponds to the rental price of...

This paper defines and analyzes a "sparse max" operator, which is a less than fully attentive and rational version of the traditional max operator. The agent builds (as economists do) a simplified model of the world which is sparse, considering only the variables of first-order importance. His...

This paper discusses and illustrates identification problems in personality psychology. The measures used by psychologists to infer traits are based on behaviors, broadly defined. These behaviors are produced from multiple traits interacting with incentives in situations. In general, measures...

We test empirically for evidence that government tariff-setting behavior depends on the degree of discretion with which policy-makers are endowed. We do this by studying government tariff choices under two distinct environments. One environment is that of tariffs set under the Escape Clause...

We present a model of endogenous firm growth with R&D investment and stochastic innovation as the engines of growth. The model for firm growth is a partial equilibrium model drawing on the quality ladder models in the macro growth literature, but also on the literature on patent races and the...

A vibrant literature has emerged that suggests willingness to pay and willingness to accept measures of value are quite different for inexperienced consumers but that value differences erode with market experience. One potential shortcoming of this literature is that market experience is...