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...

We develop a preliminary version of an Integrated Longitudinal Business Database (ILBD) that combines administrative records and survey data for all employer and nonemployer business units in the United States. Unlike other large-scale business databases, the ILBD tracks business transitions...

This paper documents the role of the collateral lending channel to facilitate small business starts and self-employment in the period before the financial crisis of 2008. We document that between 2002 and 2007 areas with a bigger run up in house prices experienced a strong increase in employment...

Recent arguments that employment growth occurs disproportionately at small establishments are fundamentally misleading because they confuse regression to the mean with structural shifts in the size distribution of establishments and with an aging effect within cohorts. The net growth usually...

Job creation is one of the most important aspects of entrepreneurship, but we know relatively little about the hiring patterns and decisions of startups. Longitudinal data from the Integrated Longitudinal Business Database (iLBD), Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS), and the Growing America through...

Our analysis seeks to understand the impact of changing allocations of property rights on investment in new firms. We focus on the Cartoon Network, et al. v. Cablevision decision in the U.S., which narrowed the protection enjoyed by content creators (e.g., movie studios) and gave greater rights...

We use the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to show that personal relationships which individuals maintain for non-economic reasons can be an important determinant of regional economic growth. We show that West German households who have social ties to East Germany in 1989 experience a persistent...

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...

We estimate the impact of COVID-19 on business failures for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) using firm-level data in seventeen countries. Absent government support, the failure rate of SMEs would have increased by 9.1 percentage points, representing 4.6 percent of private sector...

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 732 medium sized manufacturing firms in the US, France, Germany and the UK. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level productivity, profitability, Tobin%u2019s Q, sales growth and...