This paper shows that households who enter retirement with low wealth consistently followed non-permanent income consumption rules during their working years. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), household wealth in 1989 is predicted for a sample of 50-65 year olds using both current...

The nonpecuniary benefits of managing a small business are a first order consideration for many nascent entrepreneurs, yet the preference for business ownership is mostly ignored in models of entrepreneurship and occupational choice. In this paper, we study a population with varying...

The propensity to become a business owner is a nonlinear function of wealth.The relationship between wealth and entry into entrepreneurship is essentially flat over the majority of the wealth distribution.It is only at the top of the wealth distribution--after the ninety-fifth percentile--that a...