We use data from the monthly Current Population Survey to examine the short- and longer-term effects of Hurricane Katrina on the labor market outcomes of prime-age individuals in the most affected states--Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi--and for evacuees in any state. We focus on rates of labor force participation, employment, and unemployment, and we extend prior research by also ...

Entrepreneurial activity di ers substantially across countries. While cultural di erences have often been proposed as an explanation, measuring a country's cultural characteristics su ers from various problems. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that cultural factors in uence entrepreneurial behavior by looking at di erences in self-employment rates between immigrant groups within the same m...

Microenterprise programs aim to foster self-employment among the poor, those on welfare, and the unemployed. The only experimental test of their impact is the Unemployment Insurance Self-Employment Demonstration (UISED). UISED did shorten unemployment spells, but most other impacts were small and the most disadvantaged did not choose to participate. Although UISED provides some weak evidence th...

Why Do Individuals Choose Self-Employment? This paper undertakes an analysis of the motivating factors cited by the self-employed in the UK as reasons for choosing self-employment. Very limited previous research has addressed the question of why individuals report that they have chosen self-employment. Two questions are addressed using large scale labour force survey data for the UK. The first ...

Title of dissertation: THE BUSINESS CYCLE CONSEQUENCES OF INFORMAL LABOR MARKETS Alan Finkelstein Shapiro Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation directed by: Professor S. Borağan Aruoba Professor John C. Haltiwanger Department of Economics This dissertation explores the connection between the structure of labor markets and business cycle dynamics, with a focus on informality. The first chapter...

This paper models the tradeo¤ between increased autonomy from self-employment and the generally higher income that traditional employment o¤ers. While the demand for autonomy is a purely psychological construct, the economic tradeo¤s involved in its achievement are eminently amenable to quanti…cation and analytical modeling characteristic of economic analysis. We use this setup to o¤er a multif...

received additional monthly benefits because of the increase in the exempt amount. Further increases in the exempt amount would undoubtedly continue to be accompanied by even more rapid increases in the proportion of 4-quarter workers, including full-time workers, who would be able to draw benefits. One of the inequities of the retirement test before the 1954 amendments was the dual exemption g...

Little is known about how the overall employment conditions in a country impact the likelihood of employment of newly arrived refugees. In the current study, we compare employment and determinant of employment of highly educated Middle Eastern refugees to Michigan that arrived before and after the 2007 recession. We also look at self-reported barriers to employment. Results show that the genera...

High rates of self-employment among ethnic minorities in England and Wales are investigated using a framework in which the self-employment decision is influenced by ethnic-specific attributes as well as sectoral earnings differentials. As expected, differences in an individual’s predicted earnings in paid and self-employment are strongly correlated with self-employment decisions. Individuals wi...