Thirteen million people in the United States--roughly one in ten workers--own a business. And yet rates of business ownership among African Americans are much lower and have been so during the last 100 years. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, businesses owned by African Americans tend...

Using confidential microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau, we investigate the performance of Asian-owned businesses. Using regression estimates and a special nonlinear decomposition technique, we explore the role that class resources, such as financial capital and human capital, play in...

An important finding in the rapidly growing literature on self-employment is that the probability of self-employment is substantially higher among the children of business owners than among the children of non-business owners. Using data from the confidential and restrictedaccess Characteristics...

Using confidential and restricted-access microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau, we find that Asian-owned businesses are 16.9 percent less likely to close, 20.6 percent more likely to have profits of at least $10,000, and 27.2 percent more likely to hire employees than whiteowned businesses in...

Using confidential microdata from the Characteristics of Business Owners survey, 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...

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...

Using data from the confidential and restricted-access Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO) Survey, we provide some suggestive evidence on the causes of intergenerational links in business ownership and the related issue of how having a family business background affects small business...