Search Results
Working Paper
Entrepreneurship and State Taxation
Entrepreneurship plays a vital role in the economy, yet there exists little well-identified research into the effects of taxes on startup activity. Using recently developed county-level data on startups, we examine the effect of states' corporate, personal and sales tax rates on new firm activity and test for cross-border spillovers in response to these policies. We find that new firm employment is negatively?and disproportionately?affected by corporate tax rates. We find little evidence of an effect of personal and sales taxes on entrepreneurial outcomes. Our results are robust to changes in ...
Working Paper
How Did Young Firms Fare During the Great Recession? Evidence from the Kauffman Firm Survey
We examine the evolution of several key firm economic and financial variables in the years surrounding and during the Great Recession using the Kauffman Firm Survey, a large panel of young firms founded in 2004 and surveyed for eight consecutive years. We find that these young firms experienced slower growth in revenues, employment, and assets and faced tighter financing conditions during the recessionary years. While we find some evidence that firm growth picked up following the recession, it is not clear that it returned to the levels it would have been absent the recessionary shock. We ...
Working Paper
How Wealth and Age Interact to Affect Entrepreneurship
Using wealth windfalls from lottery winnings and matched employer-employee tax files, we compare the effect of additional wealth on the entrepreneurial activity of older and younger individuals. We find that additional wealth leads older winners (aged 55 and older) to reduce business ownership and scale. In contrast, additional wealth leads younger winners to increase business ownership and performance. We also show that extra lottery wealth reduces the wage labor supply of both younger and older individuals. Thus, while younger lottery winners reduce wage labor to increase entrepreneurship, ...
Working Paper
Entrepreneurial tail risk: implications for employment dynamics
New businesses are important for job creation and have contributed more than proportionally to the expansion in the 1990s and the decline of employment after the 2007 recession. This paper provides a framework for analyzing determinants of business creation in a world where new business owners are exposed to idiosyncratic risk due to initial imperfect diversification. This paper uses this framework to analyze how entrepreneurial risk has changed over time and how this has affected employment in the US. Conditions are provided under which entrepreneurial risk can be identified using micro data ...
Working Paper
Reparations and Persistent Racial Wealth Gaps
Reparations is a policy proposal aiming to address the wealth gap between Black and White households. We provide a first formal analysis of the economics of reparations using a long-run model of heterogeneous dynasties with an occupational choice and bequests. Our innovation is to introduce endogenous dispersion of beliefs about risky returns, reflecting differences in dynasties' experiences with entrepreneurship over time. Feeding the exclusion of Black dynasties from labor and capital markets as driving force, the model quantitatively reproduces current and historical racial gaps in wealth, ...
Working Paper
International trade, female labor, and entrepreneurship in MENA countries
Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries stand out in international comparisons of de jure obstacles to female employment and entrepreneurship. These obstacles are mirrored in low female labor rate participation and low entrepreneurship and ownership rates. Recent research suggests a connection between international trade and female labor participation. In this article, the authors focus on the relationship between international trade and gender in the MENA countries first analyzing female labor as a production factor, and then focusing on female entrepreneurship and firm ownership. ...
Startups Account for Smaller Share of U.S. Jobs
Since 1994, startup firms have seen their share of U.S. employment shrink.
Working Paper
Going Entrepreneurial? IPOs and New Firm Creation
Using matched employee-employer US Census data, we examine the effect of a successful initial public offering (IPO) on employee departures to startups. Accounting for the endogeneity of a firm?s choice to go public, we find strong evidence that going public induces employees to leave for start-ups. Moreover, we document that the increase in turnover following an IPO is driven by employees departing to start-ups; we find no change in the rate of employee departures for established firms. We present evidence that, following an IPO, many employees who received stock grants experience a positive ...
Report
On the Nature of Entrepreneurship
This paper provides insights into the nature of entrepreneurship using a novel panel dataset based on U.S. administrative data from the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration. These data are used to analyze patterns of income growth and determinants of entrepreneurial choice for a large population of business owners. Earlier studies relying on household survey data have been limited by small samples, short panels, and income top-coding and, as a result, have focused on the typical self-employed individual rather than the typical dollar earned in self-employment. ...
Journal Article
Puzzlingly Divergent Trends in Household Wealth and Business Formation
The rate of new business formation has declined sharply in recent decades, raising concerns among economists about job and productivity growth. This observed decline in business formation is likely to be juxtaposed to changes in characteristics such as household wealth that affect households’ propensity to become entrepreneurs. Economic theories of business formation suggest that wealthier households are more likely to start a business because wealth allows them to more easily reach a profitable scale.Justin Barnette and Andrew Glover use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from ...