We investigate the response of small businesses operating as sole proprietorships to Form 1099-K, an information report released in 2011 which provides the Internal Revenue Service with information about payment card sales. Theory and distributional analysis isolates affected taxpayers, who...

Why do levels of entrepreneurship differ across America's cities? This paper presents basic facts on two measures of entrepreneurship: the self-employment rate and the number of small firms. Both of these measures are correlated with urban success, suggesting that more entrepreneurial cities are...

Today the vast majority of multi-owner firms in the United States are corporations, but that was not the case in the past. Before the advent of the income tax, tort litigation, and significant federal regulation, entrepreneurs more often than not chose to organize as partnerships, a form that...

Empirical tests in the 1990s found little evidence of poor countries catching up with rich - unconditional convergence - since the 1960s, and divergence over longer periods. This stylized fact spurred several developments in growth theory, including AK models, poverty trap models, and the...

This paper studies the value of external commitment to policy reforms in the case of WTO/GATT accessions. The accessions often entail reforms that go beyond narrowly defined trade liberalization, and have to overcome fierce resistance in the acceding countries, as reflected in protracted...

In this paper, we examine the impact of China's growth on developing countries that specialize in manufacturing. Over 2000-2005, manufacturing accounted for 32% of China's GDP and 89% of its merchandise exports, making it more specialized in the sector than any other large developing economy....

Economic historians of the eighteenth-century British mainland North American colonies have given considerable weight to the role of exports as a stimulus for economic growth. Yet their analyses have been handicapped by reliance on one or two time series to serve as indicators of broader changes...