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Smart and Illicit: Who Becomes an Entrepreneur and Do They Earn More?

TLDR
In this article, the authors disaggregate the self-employed into incorporated and unincorporated to distinguish between "entrepreneurs" and other business owners, and find that the incorporated selfemployed and their businesses engage in activities that demand comparatively strong non-routine cognitive abilities, while the un-incorporated and their firms perform tasks demanding relatively strong manual skills.
Abstract
We disaggregate the self-employed into incorporated and unincorporated to distinguish between "entrepreneurs" and other business owners. We show that the incorporated self-employed and their businesses engage in activities that demand comparatively strong nonroutine cognitive abilities, while the unincorporated and their firms perform tasks demanding relatively strong manual skills. The incorporated selfemployed have distinct cognitive and noncognitive traits. Besides tending to be white, male, and come from higher-income families, the incorporated—as teenagers—typically scored higher on learning aptitude tests, had greater self-esteem, and engaged in more disruptive, illicit activities. The combination of "smart" and "illicit" tendencies as youths accounts for both entry into entrepreneurship and the comparative earnings of entrepreneurs. In contrast to past research, we find that entrepreneurs earn more per hour and work more hours than their salaried and unincorporated counterparts.

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The impact of COVID-19 on small business owners: Evidence from the first 3 months after widespread social-distancing restrictions.

TL;DR: Findings of early‐stage losses to small business activity have important implications for policy, income losses, and future economic inequality.
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Experimentation and the Returns to Entrepreneurship

TL;DR: The authors show that the estimates of mean and variance of returns to entrepreneurship used by these previous studies are biased, as they are based on cross-sectional data and fail to account for the option value of experimenting with new ideas.
ReportDOI

The Impact of Covid-19 on Small Business Owners: Evidence of Early-Stage Losses from the April 2020 Current Population Survey

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provided the first analysis of impacts of the pandemic on the number of active small businesses in the United States using nationally representative data from the April 2020 CPS.
ReportDOI

Opportunity versus Necessity Entrepreneurship: Two Components of Business Creation

TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose an operational definition of opportunity versus necessity entrepreneurship using readily available nationally representative data and find that "opportunity" vs. "necessity" entrepreneurship is associated with the creation of more growth-oriented businesses.
Posted Content

Personality Traits of Entrepreneurs: A Review of Recent Literature

TL;DR: This paper reviewed the extensive literature since 2000 on the personality traits of entrepreneurs and identified interesting and irreducible parts of this heterogeneity, while also identifying places where they anticipate future large-scale research and the growing depth of the field are likely to clarify matters.
References
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Posted Content

A Survey of Corporate Governance

TL;DR: The authors surveys research on corporate governance, with special attention to the importance of legal protection of investors and of ownership concentration in corporate governance systems around the world, and presents a survey of the literature.
Posted Content

Endogenous Technological Change

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that the stock of human capital determines the rate of growth, that too little human capital is devoted to research in equilibrium, that integration into world markets will increase growth rates, and that having a large population is not sufficient to generate growth.
Book

Risk, Uncertainty and Profit

TL;DR: In Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, Frank Knight explored the riddle of profitability in a competitive market profit should not be possible under competitive conditions, as the entry of new entrepreneurs would drive prices down and nullify margins, however evidence abounds of competitive yet profitable markets as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI

Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive

TL;DR: In this article, historical evidence from ancient Rome, early China, and the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe is used to investigate the hypotheses that, while the total supply of entrepreneurs varies among societies, the productive contribution of the society's entrepreneurial activities varies much more because of their allocation between productive activities and largely unproductive activities such as rent seeking or organized crime.
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