Transforming agriculture from a largely subsistence enterprise to a profitable commercial venture is both a prerequisite and a driving force for accelerated development and sustainable growth in sub-Saharan Africa. The objective of this investigation is to assess the impact of the Federal...

This paper examines the impact of pollution on entrepreneurial activity. I use the recurring cicada emergence cycles in the U.S. as exogenous shocks to show that pollution caused by pesticide use decreases entrepreneurial activity and quality by 3%. I find that pesticide use is linked to the...

A rich but tractable variant of the Burdett-Mortensen model of wage setting behavior is formulated and a dynamic market equilibrium solution to the model is defined and characterized. In the model, firms cannot commit to wage contracts. Instead, the Markov perfect equilibrium to the wage setting...

A rich but tractable variant of the Burdett-Mortensen model of wage setting behavior is formulated and a dynamic market equilibrium solution to the model is defined and characterized. In the model, firms cannot commit to wage contracts. Instead, the Markov perfect equilibrium to the wage setting...

US entrepreneurs typically work long hours in their firms and these hours form a large part of the firms' labor input. This paper studies the role of endogenous owner hours in shaping the wealth distribution among entrepreneurs. We introduce owners' endogenous labor supply into a model of...

A rich but tractable variant of the Burdett-Mortensen model of wage setting behavior is formulated and a dynamic market equilibrium solution to the model is defined and characterized. In the model, firms cannot commit to wage contracts. Instead, the Markov perfect equilibrium to the wage setting...

Entrepreneurs' exposure to economic uncertainty from regulation, monetary policy, and taxation is exacerbated by the inflexibility of capital asset commitments. Entrepreneurs adapt to uncertainty by reducing asset specificity. While the mainstream approach tends to focus on reduced aggregate...

About half of all startups fail within five years, and those that survive grow at vastly different speeds. Using Census microdata, we estimate that most of these differences are determined by ex-ante heterogeneity rather than persistent ex-post shocks. Embedding such heterogeneity in a firm...

How are the options to buy and sell a business relevant for entrepreneurs? Prospective entrepreneurs value the purchase of mature firms while incumbents want to recover both the tangible and intangible value of their businesses upon exit. We introduce a theory of entrepreneurial assets transfer...

After impressive growth in the 2000s, China's productivity has more recently stagnated. We use firm-level data to analyze productivity and firm dynamism trends from 2003 to 2018. We document six facts that together show a decline in China’s business dynamism. We show that (i) the revenue share...