The environment for business creation is central to economic policy, as entrepreneurs are believed to be forces of innovation, employment and economic dynamism. We use data from the National Longitudinal Surveys (NLS) to investigate the relative importance of financial and human capital...

We measure the effects of parental education on the education profile of wages. The analysis uses sibling pairs from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience of Young Men and Young Women. We also use the variance across siblings in...

In this paper we develop and estimate a factor model of the earnings, labor supply, and wages of young men and young women, their parents and their siblings. We estimate the model using data on matched sibling and parent-child pairs from the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market...

This paper examines the links between the labor market outcomes of individuals who are related by blood or by marriage using panel data on pairs of matched family members from the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experience. We examine the intergenerational and sibling correlations...

Health Insurance has claimed a prominent place on the policy agenda in the United States. Critics argue that the status quo has lead to spiraling health care costs, an inequitable distribution of quality medical care, and that employer-provided health insurance has "locked" individuals into...

National, state, and local policy makers have increasingly focused their attention on policies toward economic growth, especially efforts to raise the rate of investment. Recent studies of economic growth have raised a debate over the role played by the investment rate in the long-run...

A number of studies have suggested a quantitatively important relationship between public-sector capital accumulation and private sector productivity, with the most compelling evidence derived from analyses of state-level data. Estimates herein of production functions that use standard...

Recent proposals assume that endowing the U.S. President with a line item veto will reduce spending. Analysis of a rich set of state budget data indicates that long run budgets are not altered by an item veto. In the short run, the item veto's potency is contingent upon the political setting....

Recently, attention has focused on the estate tax. To date, however, the debate over estate taxes has been nearly devoid of standard considerations of deadweight loss. We develop a framework for computing the deadweight loss of a revenue-neutral switch from an estate tax to a capital income tax,...

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...