For the first thirteen years after entry, the hazard rate for firm exits is persistently higher for urban than for rural firms. While differences in observed industry market, local market, and firm attributes explain some of the rural/urban gap in firm survival, rural firms retain a survival...

The fraction of self-employed rises in recessions because wage work is more sensitive than self-employment to the business cycle, not because of necessity entrepreneurship. Graduating during a recession reduces the probability of starting a business for the next 11 years.

We hypothesize that hog production can be characterized by complementarities between new technologies, worker skills, and farms size. Such production processes are consistent with Kremer's O-ring production theory in which a single mistake in any one of several complementary tasks in a firm's...

This study investigates worker shares of the returns to scale and returns to technology adoption on U.S. hog farms. The wage analysis controls for a matching process by which workers are linked to farms of different sizes and technology uses. Using four surveys of employees on hog farms...

By allowing agents to switch from entrepreneurship to wage work and vice versa over the life cycle, this study proposes a dynamic Jacks-of-All-Trades (JAT) model where entrepreneurs invest in highly varied skills to manage their business. We simultaneously endogenize human capital investment and...

The hypothetical distribution of multiple technology adoptions under the assumption that technologies are mutually independent is compared against the actual observed distribution of technology adoptions on hog farms. Combinations of technologies that occur with greater frequency than would...

A long-standing puzzle in labor economics has been the positive relationship between wages and firm size. Even after controlling for worker's observed characteristics such as education, work experience, gender, and geographic location, a significant firm size wage effect averaging 15 percent...