Very little is known about the relationship betweentax rates and business growth. The central question is whether firms with largedecreases in tax rates grow faster than those without those decreases. A studyof 31,034 tax returns from the Statistics of Income Individual Tax Files for1985 and...

Examines sole proprietorships and the extent to which the decision to become an entrepreneur is influenced by inheritance size - i.e., access to capital. A group of approximately 3,000 people were identified through US Internal Revenue Service data, including estate tax returns to identify those...

Why should the United States engage in broad reform of its health care? Because it must. When should health care reform begin? Yesterday would be best, but today for sure. And how should reform be done? It should focus on continuous incremental changes to the cultural, legal, and regulatory...

Health Insurance has claimed a prominent place on the policy agenda in the United States. Critics argue that the status quo has lead to spiraling health care costs, an inequitable distribution of quality medical care, and that employer-provided health insurance has quot;lockedquot; individuals...

One criticism of the estate tax is that it prevents the owners of family businesses from passing their enterprises to their children. The problem is that it may be difficult to pay estate taxes without liquidating the business. A natural question is why individuals with such concerns do not...

Using data from the Wisconsin Entrepreneurial Climate Study, we study the sources of firms' finance during the very early stages of their lives. Our focus is the evolution of the mix of financial capital from 'insiders' and 'outsiders' as firms age. We find that at the beginning of firms' life...

Some commentators have suggested that the absence of portable health insurance impedes people from leaving their jobs to start new firms. We investigate this belief by comparing wage-earners who become self-employed during a given period of time with their counterparts who do not. By examining...

Over the past decade, concern over potential global warming has focused attention on the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and there is an active debate concerning the desirability of reducing emissions. At the heart of this debate is the future path of both greenhouse gas...

We specify a modem of municipal labor demand when resource flows available to the municipality are not known with certainty. The model allows us to test the hypothesis that employment decisions are rational in the sense that they incorporate all available information at the time that the...

This paper investigates the effect of entrepreneurs' personal income tax situations on their use of labor. We analyze the income tax returns of a large number of sole proprietors before and after the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and determine how the substantial reductions in marginal tax rates...