Modern empirical work on the choice between renting and owning focuses on the concept of the "user cost" of housing, which integrates into a single measure the various components of housing costs. The standard approach implicitly assumes that households know the user cost of housing with...

This paper investigates the effect of entrepreneurs' personal income tax situations on their use of labor. We analyze the income tax returns of a large number of sole proprietors before and after the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and determine how the substantial reductions in marginal tax rates...

The question of how entrepreneurship relates to income mobility is cogent given the current public debate about the sources of income inequality and mobility in United States society. We examine how experience with entrepreneurship has affected an individual's place in the earnings distribution....

One criticism of the estate tax is that it prevents the owners of family businesses from passing their enterprises to their children. The problem is that it may be difficult to pay estate taxes without liquidating the business. A natural question is why individuals with such concerns do not...

This paper examines the intertemporal linkages between local government expenditures and revenues. In the terminology that has become standard in the literature on vector autoregression analysis, the issue is whether revenues Granger-cause expenditures, or expenditures Granger-cause revenues....

This paper investigates the effect of entrepreneurs' personal income tax situations on the growth rates of their enterprises. We analyze the personal income tax returns of a large number of sole proprietors before and after the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and determine how the substantial reductions...

This paper investigates the effect of entrepreneurs' personal income tax situations on their capital investment decisions. We examine the income tax returns of a sample of sole proprietors before and after the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and determine how the substantial reductions in marginal tax...

Some commentators have suggested that the absence of portable health insurance impedes people from leaving their jobs to start new firms. We investigate this belief by comparing wage-earners who become self-employed during a given period of time with their counterparts who do not. By examining...

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...

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...