This paper analyzes the role of liquidity constraints in the formation of new entrepreneurial enterprises. The basic empirical strategy is to determine whether an individual's wealth affects the probability of becoming an entrepreneur, and the conditional amounts of depreciable assets, ceteris...

Modern empirical work on the choice between renting and owning focuses on the concept of the "user cost" of housing, which integrates into a single measure the various components of housing costs. The standard approach implicitly assumes that households know the user cost of housing with...

Despite widespread concern and discussion, no consensus exists concerning the causes of the "infrastructure crisis." We investigate several models of the determination of local public capital expenditures. Using Euler equation methods, we find that the hypothesis that construction spending is...

In current discussions of tax reform in the United States, there is considerable controversy concerning the effects of allowing individuals to deduct state and local taxes when calculating their federal income tax liability. Recent econometric work has suggested that federal deductibility of...

This paper considers estimation and testing of vector autoregression coefficients in panel data, and applies the techniques to analyze the dynamic properties of revenues, expenditures, and grants in a sample of United States municipalities. The model allows for nonstationary individual effects,...

The question of how entrepreneurship relates to income mobility is cogent given the current public debate about the sources of income inequality and mobility in United States society. We examine how experience with entrepreneurship has affected an individual's place in the earnings distribution....

This paper analyzes the role of liquidity constraints in the formation of new entrepreneurial enterprises. The basic empirical strategy is to determine whether an individual's wealth affects the probability of becoming an entrepreneur, and the conditional amounts of depreciable assets, ceteris...

We specify a modem of municipal labor demand when resource flows available to the municipality are not known with certainty. The model allows us to test the hypothesis that employment decisions are rational in the sense that they incorporate all available information at the time that the...

One criticism of the estate tax is that it prevents the owners of family businesses from passing their enterprises to their children. The problem is that it may be difficult to pay estate taxes without liquidating the business. A natural question is why individuals with such concerns do not...

This paper examines the intertemporal linkages between local government expenditures and revenues. In the terminology that has become standard in the literature on vector autoregression analysis, the issue is whether revenues Granger-cause expenditures, or expenditures Granger-cause revenues....