Suchergebnisse

"In this paper, we show that substantial heterogeneity exists among U.S. small businesses owners with respect to their ex-ante expectations of future performance, their ex-ante desire for future growth, and their initial motives for starting a business. Specifically, using new data that samples early stage entrepreneurs just prior to business start up, we show that few small businesses intend to bring a new idea to market. Instead, most intend to provide an existing service to an existing customer base. Further, using the same data, we find that most small businesses have no desire to grow big or to innovate in any observable way. We show that such behavior is consistent with the industry characteristics of the overwhelming majority of small businesses, which are concentrated among skilled craftsmen, lawyers, real estate agents, doctors, small shopkeepers, and restaurateurs. Lastly, we show non pecuniary benefits (being one's own boss, having flexibility of hours, etc.) play a first-order role in the business formation decision. We conclude by discussing how failing to acknowledge the ex-ante heterogeneity can lead to biased inferences of the importance of entrepreneurial talent, entrepreneurial luck, and financial frictions from the ex-post distribution of firm size"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"There is a large literature showing that the self employed underreport their income to tax authorities. In this paper, we quantify the extent to which the self employed systematically underreport their income to U.S. household surveys. To do so, we use the Engel curve describing the relationship between income and expenditures of wage and salary workers to infer the actual income, and thus the reporting gap, of the self employed based on their reported expenditures. We find that the self employed underreport their income by about 30 percent. This result is remarkably robust across data sources and alternative model specifications. Aside from transportation expenditures, we find little evidence that the self employed misreport their expenditures to household surveys. We show that failing to account for such income underreporting leads to biased conclusions when comparing the earnings and saving behavior between the self employed and other workers as well as biased estimates of the importance of precautionary savings, the shape of lifecycle earnings profiles, and the magnitude of earnings differences across MSAs. Finally, our results show that it is naive for researchers to take it for granted that individuals will provide unbiased information to household surveys when they are simultaneously providing distorted information to other administrative sources"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

We use scanner data and time diaries to document how households substitute time for money through shopping and home production. We document substantial heterogeneity in prices paid for identical goods for the same area and time, with older households shopping the most and paying the lowest prices. Doubling shopping frequency lowers a good's price by 7 to 10 percent. We estimate the shopper's price of time and use this series to estimate an elasticity of substitution between time and goods in home production of roughly 1.8. The observed lifecycle time allocation implies a consumption series that differs markedly from expenditures. (JEL D12, D91)