Theoretical models of entrepreneurship posit that attitudes toward risk, entrepreneurial ability, and preferences for autonomy are central to the individual's decision between self-employment and wage/salary work.  None of the studies in the rapidly growing empirical literature on...

Access to information may represent an important barrier to learning about 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 detracting...

A rapidly growing literature examines the impact of immigrants on the labor market outcomes of native-born Americans.  However, the impact of immigration on natives in entrepreneurship has not been examined, despite the over-representation of immigrants in that sector and theoretical reasons...

We analyze the behavior of world interest rates, focusing on the ramifications of European Monetary Union. Our analysis indicates that nominal US interest rates tend to drive European rates at both the short and long horizons. There is some evidence that US rates are becoming increasingly...

The empirical “gravity†equation is extremely successful in explaining bilateral trade. This paper shows how a multi-country model of specialization and costly trade (i.e. a microfounded gravity model) can be applied to explain empirical exchange rate puzzles. One such puzzle is the...

Using confidential microdata from the Characteristics of Business Owners, we examine why African-American owned businesses lag substantially behind white-owned businesses in sales, profits, employment, and survival.  Black business owners are much less likely than white owners to have had a...

From the 1890s to 1960, industrial policy provided vital aid to the development of the Japanese iron and steel industry. Japanese industrial policy proved successful in steel even though public support was much prolonged, subject to political influence, and based on limited forecasting power ex...

In this paper, a simple search model of the labor market is combined with sticky prices to investigate the dynamic response of the economy to nominal interest rate shocks. The framework allows the respective roles of labor market search, nominal price rigidities, and policy inertia in accounting...

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...