Rapid small business ownership growth rates among women have motivated research on issues related to gender and small business performance. The importance of credit access for the success of small businesses, as well as evidence that women have less access to credit than male business owners,...

Innovators' personal experience and social networks may affect their familiarity with customer needs, and in turn the types of products they bring to market. Consistent with this channel, we document that innovators create products that are more likely to be purchased by customers similar to...

This paper provides novel evidence that female U.S. House Representatives causally increase the U.S. government's demand for products and services provided by female entrepreneurs. Using detailed data on individual contracts between the U.S. federal government and private firms around close U.S....

We examine whether renter protection encourages entrepreneurship by reducing household vulnerability in home-rental markets. Passages of just cause eviction ordinance in three Californian cities are associated with a 9.6% increase in the number of new firms, and the increase is greater for firms...

In this paper, I argue that religion matters for the emergence of democracies and dictatorships. Religion is defined as demand for public goods. Different types of religious collectives reflect different tradeoffs between centralized resource distribution and market rewards. Religions are...

Only yesterday, all animals were wild. Zoological archaeologists assert that about 15,000 years ago, our hunter-gatherer forebears achieved the first domestication — the dog. Over the course of ensuing millennia, they proceeded to domesticate sheep, cattle, and other livestock. By the advent...

Economists believe that a problem of team production results from the desirability of production in (sometimes large) groups, the difficulty of rewarding individual group members based on their (difficult or impossible to measure) individual contributions, and the presumed interest of each...

In this paper, I test the effects of religious norms on the provision of public goods. My evidence is drawn from public goods experiments that I ran with regional bureaucrats in Tomsk and Novosibirsk, Russia. I introduce three treatments, which I define as degrees of Eastern Orthodox...

In this paper we estimate the income distributional effects of the common agricultural policy (CAP) for farmers and landowners. First, we theoretically analyse the level of farmers' and landowners' gains from coupled and decoupled payments. Second, using a unique farm level panel data set from...

In this chapter, we review land market institutions in the European Union (EU) and their potential impact on land markets. We first review land tenure-/ownership regulations and find that they vary heavily across EU Member States. Four types of tenure-/ownership measures are implemented in the...