Poverty rates on Native American Indian reservations are triple the US average. Small business incubation programs, available elsewhere in the US, are sparse on the reservations. Small businesses are potent drivers of US economic growth. Some 25.5 million entrepreneurs generate more than 50% of...

This paper addresses, both theoretically and empirically, the sectoral patterns of job creation and job destruction in order to distinguish the alternative effects of embodied vs disembodied technological change operating into a vertically connected economy. Disembodied technological change...

We estimate differences in innovation behavior between foreign versus U.S.-born entrepreneurs in high-tech industries. Our data come from the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs, a random sample of firms with detailed information on owner characteristics and innovation activities. We find uniformly...

What is the optimal form of firm organization during "bad times"? Using two large micro datasets on firm decentralization from US administrative data and 10 OECD countries, we find that firms that delegated more power from the Central Headquarters to local plant managers prior to the Great...

When investing in research and development (R&D), institutions must decide whether to take a top-down approach - soliciting a particular technology - or a bottom-up approach in which innovators suggest ideas. This paper examines a reform to the U.S. Air Force Small Business Innovation Research...

Job creation is one of the most important aspects of entrepreneurship, but we know relatively little about the hiring patterns and decisions of startups. Longitudinal data from the Integrated Longitudinal Business Database (iLBD), Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS), and the Growing America through...

Analyzing a list of all Small Business Administration (SBA) loans in 1991 to 2009 linked with annual information on all U.S. employers from 1976 to 2012, we apply detailed matching and regression methods to estimate the variation in SBA loan effects on job creation and firm survival across firm...

We analyze linked databases on all Small Business Administration (SBA) loans, on all SBA lenders, and on all U.S. employers to estimate the effects of financial access on employment growth. Our methods combine regressions with matching on firm age, size, industry, year, and employment history,...

We evaluate the impact of a place-based infrastructure development scheme directed towards India's most "backward" districts, on the performance of microenterprises. "Backward" districts were selected based on a transparent score-based assignment mechanism. Using a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity...

Too often, academics and policy makers interpret formality as a binary choice and formalization as an irreversible process. Yet, formalization has many facets and shades on the business and labor fronts, and firms may not be able or willing to formalize all at once. This paper explores the joint...