In the 1980s, many U.S. cities initiated programs reserving a proportion of government contracts for minority-owned businesses. The staggered introduction of these set-aside programs is used to estimate their impacts on the self-employment and employment rates of African-American men. Black...

Computers are an important part of modern education, yet large segments of the population - especially low-income and minority children - lack access to a computer at home. Does this impede educational achievement? We test this hypothesis by conducting the largest-ever field experiment involving...

Employer-provided health insurance in the United States is suspected of restricting job mobility, resulting in job lock. Previous research on job lock finds mixed results using several methodologies. We take a new approach to examine whether employer-based health insurance discourages job...

The economic expansion of the late 1990s created many opportunities for business creation in Silicon Valley, but the opportunity cost of starting a business was also high during this period because of the exceptionally tight labor market. A new measure of entrepreneurship derived from matching...

There is no clear theoretical prediction regarding whether home computers are an important input in the educational production function. To investigate the hypothesis that access to a home computer affects educational outcomes, we conduct the first-ever field experiment involving the provision...

Indian immigrants in the United States and other wealthy countries are successful in entrepreneurship. Using Census data from the three largest developed countries receiving Indian immigrants in the world -- the United States, United Kingdom and Canada -- we examine the performance of Indian...

Employer-provided health insurance may restrict job mobility, resulting in job lock. Previous research on job lock finds mixed results using several methodologies. We take a new approach to examine job-lock by exploiting the discontinuity created at age 65 through the qualification for Medicare....

Access to information may represent an important barrier to learning about and ultimately transferring to 4-year colleges for low-income community college students. This paper explores the role that access to information technology, in particular, plays in enhancing, or possibly detracting from,...

Immigrants are widely perceived as being highly entrepreneurial and important for economic growth and innovation. This is reflected in immigration policies and many developed countries have created special visas and entry requirements in an attempt to attract immigrant entrepreneurs. Not...

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...