This paper examines tax return-generated data on the labor force behavior of people before and after they receive inheritances. The results are consistent with Andrew Carnegie's century-old assertion that large inheritances decrease a person's labor force participation. For example, a single...

The question of how entrepreneurship relates to income mobility is cogent given the current public debate about the sources of income inequality and mobility in United States society. We examine how experience with entrepreneurship has affected an individual's place in the earnings distribution....

This paper examines the intertemporal linkages between local government expenditures and revenues. In the terminology that has become standard in the literature on vector autoregression analysis, the issue is whether revenues Granger-cause expenditures, or expenditures Granger-cause revenues....

This paper analyzes the role of liquidity constraints in the formation of new entrepreneurial enterprises. The basic empirical strategy is to determine whether an individual's wealth affects the probability of becoming an entrepreneur, and the conditional amounts of depreciable assets, ceteris...

Despite widespread concern and discussion, no consensus exists concerning the causes of the "infrastructure crisis" or its implications for the efficiency of government decision-making more generally. We investigate several models of the determination of local public capital expenditures. Using...

Entrepreneurship has been a subject of much recent discussion among academics and policymakers because of the belief that it invigorates the economy -- producing greater productivity, more jobs, and higher economic growth. President George W. Bush promoted his economic plan by pointing to its...