In this paper we analyze microdata to explore differences in the rates at which American and German workers leave their salaried jobs to become self-employed. We document that the rate of self-employment is lower in Germany than in the United States, and the rate of transition from wage-earning...

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....

The authors examine survival rates of entrepreneurial enterprises and their growth, conditional on surviving. Their focus is on whether liquidity constraints increase the likelihood of entrepreneurial failure. The empirical strategy is based on the following logic: If entrepreneurs cannot borrow...

This paper examines the intertemporal linkages between local government expenditures and revenues. The main results that emerge from an analysis of fiscal data from 171 municipal governments over the period 1972-80 are that (1) one or two years are sufficient to summarize the relevant dynamic...

This paper considers estimation and testing of vector autoregressio n coefficients in panel data, and applies the techniques to analyze the dynamic relationships between wages an d hours worked in two samples of American males. The model allows for nonstationary individual effects and is...

The authors specify a model of municipal labor demand when resource flows available to the municipality are uncertain. The model allows them to test the hypothesis that employment decisions are rational in the sense that they incorporate all available information at the time that the decisions...

This paper examines tax-return-generated data on the labor force behavior of people before and after they receive inheritances. The results are consistent with Andrew Carnegie's century-old assertion that large inheritances decrease a person's labor-force participation. For example, a single...