Theories of market failures and targeting motivate the promotion of entrepreneurship training programs and generate testable predictions regarding heterogeneous treatment effects from such programs. Using a large randomized evaluation in the United States, we find no strong or lasting effects on...

Theoretical models of entrepreneurship posit that attitudes toward risk, entrepreneurial ability, and preferences for autonomy are central to the individual's decision between self-employment and wage/salary work.  None of the studies in the rapidly growing empirical literature on...

A rapidly growing literature examines the impact of immigrants on the labor market outcomes of native-born Americans.  However, the impact of immigration on natives in entrepreneurship has not been examined, despite the over-representation of immigrants in that sector and theoretical reasons...

Using confidential microdata from the Characteristics of Business Owners, we examine why African-American owned businesses lag substantially behind white-owned businesses in sales, profits, employment, and survival.  Black business owners are much less likely than white owners to have had a...

In the 1980s, many U.S. cities initiated programs reserving a proportion of government contracts for minority-owned businesses. The staggered introduction of these set-aside programs is used to estimatetheir impacts on the self-employment and employment rates of African-American men. Black...

Estimates from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) indicate that African-American men are one-third as likely to be self-employed as white men.  The large discrepancy is due to a black transition rate into self-employment that is approximately one half the white rate and a black...

We show that entrepreneurship rates differ substantially across 60 ethnic and racial groups in the United States.  These differences exist within broad combinations of groups such as Asians and Hispanics, and are almost as great after regression controls, including age, education, immigrant...

Estimates from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) indicate that African-American men are one-third as likely to be self-employed as white men.  The large discrepancy is due to a black transition rate into self-employment that is approximately one half the white rate and a black...

We examine trends in entrepreneurship among white and black men from 1910 to 1990 using Census and CPS microdata.  Self-employment rates fell over most of the century and then started to rise after 1970.  For white men, we find that the decline was due to declining rates within industries,...

Using Current Population Survey (CPS) microdata, I examine trends and the causes of the trends from1979 to 1998 in entrepreneurship among several ethnic/racial groups in the United States.  I find rapid growth rates for the number of self-employed blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native...