Computer and Internet use, especially in developing countries, has expanded rapidly in recent years. Even in light of this expansion in technology adoption rates, penetration rates differ markedly between developed and developing countries and across developing countries. To identify the...

Using Current Population Survey (CPS) microdata, I examine trends and the causes of the trends from 1979 to 1998 in business ownership among several ethnic/racial groups in the United States. I find rapid growth rates for the number of self-employed blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans...

Recent research has concluded that the children of business owners are substantially more likely than others to become self-employed themselves. The authors of this study find that more than half of business owners in the confidential, restricted-access 1992 Characteristics of Business Owners...

Using NLSY data, the authors estimate the long-term costs of job displacement for young adults. Earnings and wage losses were large for the first three years following displacement. Compared to earnings losses found by other studies for more mature workers, however, earnings losses for these...

To identify the determinants of cross-country disparities in personal computer and Internet penetration, we examine a panel of 161 countries over the 1999-2001 period. Our candidate variables include economic variables (income per capita, years of schooling, illiteracy, trade openness),...

Using Current Population Survey (CPS) data from 1989 to 1999, we examine the impact of family cap policies, which deny incremental welfare benefits, on out-of-wedlock birth rates. We use the first five states that were granted waivers from the Department of Health and Human Services to implement...

We examine trends in self-employment among white and black men from 1910 to 1990 using Census and CPS microdata. Self-employment rates fell over most of the century and then started to rise after 1970. For white men, we find that the decline was due to declining rates within industries, but was...

A rapidly growing literature examines the impact of immigrants on the labor market outcomes of native-born Americans. However, the impact of immigration on natives in self-employment has not been examined, despite the over-representation of immigrants in that sector. We first present a new...

Previous studies tend to find that immigration has a weak negative effect on the employment and earnings of native-born workers. These studies generally overlook the effect of immigration on an important sector of the labor force, the self-employed. Anecdotal evidence suggests that immigrants,...