Four decades ago, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan made the argument that the black family was not strong enough to create those extended clans that elsewhere were most helpful for businessmen and professionals. Using data from the confidential and restricted access Characteristics of...

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...

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 estimate their 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 whit men in the United States. The large discrepancies due to a black transition rate into self-employment which is approximately one half the white rate and...

Using confidential and restricted-access microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau, we find that Asian-owned businesses are 16.9 percent less likely to close, 20.6 percent more likely to have profits of at least $10,000, and 27.2 percent more likely to hire employees than whiteowned businesses in...

In this paper I assert that the entrepreneurial spirit can also exist in salaried jobs. I study the determinants of wages and the labor market success of two kinds of entrepreneurial women in Germany – self-employed and salaried businesswomen – and investigate whether ethnicity is important...