Since the September 11 attacks (9/11), the U.S. has seen a tightening of immigration policies. Previous studies find that stricter immigration enforcement has the unintended effect of pushing undocumented immigrants into self-employment. This paper builds on the literature to better understand...

This paper analyzes causes of the low self-employment rates among Hispanics, which are nearly half of non-Hispanic white self-employment rates. Relatively little is known of the reason for the lower entrepreneurship rates among Hispanics, the fastest growing ethnic group in the U.S. The paper...

This paper examines causes of the low self-employment rates among Mexican-Hispanics by studying self-employment entry utilizing the 1996 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). The data show that Mexican-Hispanics are less likely to be self-employed as well as entering...

Over the past two decades, the U.S. has seen a drastic growth in self-employment among Mexican immigrants, the largest immigrant population in the country. This is an interesting yet puzzling trend, in stark contrast to the stagnated growth of self-employment among other disadvantaged minority...

This paper identifies intermarriage (between non-citizens and citizens) as an important response mechanism to intensified immigration enforcement, particularly among Mexican non-citizens. Exploiting the temporal and geographic variation in the implementation of interior immigration enforcement...

In 2012, the Obama Administration issued the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program by executive order. Since then, more than 800,000 undocumented immigrants who arrived as children have benefited from renewable 2-year reprieves from deportation and work permits. In 2017, the...

With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Asians became the victims of a sudden increase in racial discrimination as public officials repeatedly referred to the virus as the "Chinese virus." We document that Asian entrepreneurship has been disproportionally hurt after January 2020, particularly...

This paper uses data from the 1980 and 1990 U.S. Censuses to study labor market assimilation of self-employed immigrants. Separate earnings functions for the self-employed and wage/salary workers are estimated. To control for endogenous sorting into the sectors, models of the self-employment...

This paper utilizes the self-employed to analyze the observed increase in the educational earnings premium in the 1980's. The paper compares the predictions of the signaling and human capital models in response to an exogenous demand shock such as a skill-biased technological change. Since the...

This paper uses data from the 1980 and 1990 U.S. Censuses to analyze the labor market experience of high-skilled immigrants relative to high-skilled natives. Immigrants are found to be more likely to be working in one of the high-skilled occupations than natives, but the gap between the two...