Computers are an important part of modern education, yet many schoolchildren lack access to a computer at home. We test whether this impedes educational achievement by conducting the largest-ever field experiment that randomly provides free home computers to students. Although computer ownership...

This paper presents results from a randomized …eld experiment to test for the impor- tance of limited commitment (due to incomplete contract enforceability) in explaining intra- household risk sharing arrangements in Kenya. The experiment followed 142 daily income earners and their spouses...

This paper presents results from a field experiment designed to test whether savings constraints prevent the self-employed from increasing the size of their businesses. We opened interest-free savings accounts in a local village bank in rural Kenya for a randomly selected sample of poor daily...

We examine trends in entrepreneurship among white and black men from 1910 to 1990 using Census and CPS microdata.  Self-employment rates fell over most of the century and then started to rise after 1970.  For white men, we find that the decline was due to declining rates within industries,...

Using Current Population Survey (CPS) microdata, I examine trends and the causes of the trends from1979 to 1998 in entrepreneurship among several ethnic/racial groups in the United States.  I find rapid growth rates for the number of self-employed blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native...

Estimates from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) indicate that African-American men are one-third as likely to be self-employed as white men.  The large discrepancy is due to a black transition rate into self-employment that is approximately one half the white rate and a black...

Theories of market failures and targeting motivate the promotion of entrepreneurship training programs and generate testable predictions regarding heterogeneous treatment effects from such programs. Using a large randomized evaluation in the United States, we find no strong or lasting effects on...

Administrative data from a large and diverse community college are used to examine if underrepresented minority students benefit from taking courses with underrepresented minority instructors. To identify racial interactions we estimate models that include both student and classroom fixed...

Theoretical models of entrepreneurship posit that attitudes toward risk, entrepreneurial ability, and preferences for autonomy are central to the individual's decision between self-employment and wage/salary work.  None of the studies in the rapidly growing empirical literature on...

A rapidly growing literature examines the impact of immigrants on the labor market outcomes of native-born Americans.  However, the impact of immigration on natives in entrepreneurship has not been examined, despite the over-representation of immigrants in that sector and theoretical reasons...