Why Are the Returns to Education Higher for Entrepreneurs than for Employees? We compare the returns to education (RTE) for entrepreneurs and employees, based on 19 waves of the NLSY database. By using instrumental variable techniques (IV) and taking account of selectivity, we find that the RTE are significantly higher for entrepreneurs than for employees (18.3 percent and 9.9 percent, respecti...

This paper identifies the effect of financing constraints on firms’ labor demand. We exploit exogenous funding shocks to German savings banks during the US mortgage crisis that are unrelated to local conditions. We find that firms with credit relationships with affected banks experienced a significant decline in employment and in labor compensation relative to firms whose credit relationships w...

Public-works programs in developing countries have recently attracted a lot of attention as anti-poverty initiatives. This paper analyzes the labor-market impacts of the largest public-works program in the world, the Indian NREGS, using information about its rollout in a regression-discontinuity design. The results suggest that the overall employment and casual wage impacts are small, although ...

We use experimental data from a résumé audit to estimate the impact of particular college majors and internship experience on employment prospects. Despite applying exclusively to business-related job openings, we find no evidence that business degrees improve employment prospects. By contrast, internship experience increases the interview rate by 14 percent. The returns to internship experienc...

In Lentz and Mortensen (2005), we formulate and estimate a market equilibrium model of endogenous growth through product innovation in the spirit of Klette and Kortum (2004). In this paper, we provide a quantitative solution to the social planner’s problem in the modeled environment. We find that the optimal growth rate is over three times larger than its value in market equilibrium and that th...

In this paper we study the semiclassical asymptotics of the 6j symbols for the representation theory of the quantized enveloping algebra Uq(sl2) for q a primitive root of unity. Because of the work of Finkelberg [7], these 6j symbols can also be defined in terms of fusion product of representations of the affine Lie algebra ŝl2, defined using Wess-Zumino-Witten conformal field theory. This asso...

Previous research has identified non-diversifiable risk and a preference for “being one’s own boss” as key determinants of participation in self-employment. Using a simple model of occupational choice, I show how both factors can cause efficiency losses in a free market economy, and how linear differential occupational taxation can improve on the market outcome. A simulation exercise calibrated...