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 field experiment to test for the importance 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 for 8...

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...

The "Great Recession" resulted in many business closings and foreclosures, but what effect did it have on business formation? On the one hand, recessions decrease potential business income and wealth, but on the other hand they restrict opportunities in the wage/salary sector leaving the net...

Boys are doing worse in school than are girls, which has been dubbed "the Boy Crisis." An analysis of the latest data on educational outcomes among boys and girls reveals extensive disparities in grades, reading and writing test scores, and other measurable educational outcomes, and these...

A substantial amount of money is spent on technology by schools, families and policymakers with the hope of improving educational outcomes. This chapter explores the theoretical and empirical literature on the impacts of technology on educational outcomes. The literature focuses on two primary...

Using confidential microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau, we investigate the performance of female-owned businesses, making comparisons to male-owned businesses. Using regression estimates and a decomposition technique, we explore the role that human capital, especially through prior work...

The economic expansion of the late 1990s created many opportunities for business creation in Silicon Valley, but the opportunity cost of starting a business was also high during this period because of the exceptionally tight labor market. A new measure of entrepreneurship derived from matching...

A large body research shows a positive relationship between wealth and entrepreneurship and interprets the relationship as providing evidence of liquidity constraints. Recently, however, the liquidity constraint interpretation has been challenged because of the finding that the relationship...