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...

This note shows that the aggregate fiscal expenditure stimulus in the United States, properly adjusted for the declining fiscal expenditure of the fifty states, was close to zero in 2009. While the Federal government stimulus prevented a net decline in aggregate fiscal expenditure, it did not...

Access to information may represent an important barrier to finding information and ultimately transferring to 4-year colleges for low-income community college students. This paper explores the role that access to information technology, in particular, plays in enhancing, or possibly...

Developing Asia experienced a sharp surge in foreign currency reserves prior to the 2008-9 crisis. The global crisis has been associated with an unprecedented rise of swap agreements between central banks of larger economies and their counterparts in smaller economies. We explore whether such...

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...

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...

Computers are an important part of modern education, yet many schoolchildren lack access to a computer at home. We test whether this impedes educational achievement by conducting the largest-ever field experiment that randomly provides free home computers to students. Although computer ownership...

Administrative data from a large and diverse community college are used to examine if underrepresented minority students benefit from taking courses with underrepresented minority instructors. To identify racial interactions we estimate models that include both student and classroom fixed...

The onset of the US credit crisis in 2008, and its rapid globalization induced the FED to extend unprecedented swap-lines of 30 billion dollars to four emerging markets, and the proliferation of other cross-countries selective swap arrangements. This paper explores the logic for these...

Should exporters worry about country-of-origin bias? Although the pervasiveness of country-level product advertising suggests that they do, lack of data has limited the empirical study of subjective bias toward products from a specific country. Using data from the U.S. wine industry, including...