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Using confidential microdata from the U. S. Census Bureau, we investigate the performance of female-owned businesses, making comparisons to male-owned businesses. Using regression estimates and a decomposition technique, we explore the role that human capital, especially through prior work experience, and financial capital play in contributing to why female-owned businesses have lower survival rates, profits, employment, and sales. We find that female-owned businesses are less successful than male-owned businesses because they have less startup capital, less business human capital acquired through prior work experience in a similar business, and less prior work experience in a family business. We also find some evidence that female business owners work fewer hours and may have different preferences for the goals of their businesses, which may have implications for business outcomes.

Using confidential microdata from the Characteristics of Business Owners survey, we examine why African American–owned businesses lag substantially behind white‐owned businesses in sales, profits, employment, and survival. Black business owners are much less likely than white owners to have had a self‐employed family member owner prior to starting their business and less likely to have worked in that family member’s business. Using a nonlinear decomposition technique, we find that the lack of prior work experience in a family business among black business owners, perhaps by limiting their acquisition of general and specific business human capital, negatively affects black business outcomes.

Administrative data from a large and diverse community college are used to examine if underrepresented minority students benefit from taking courses with underrepresented minority instructors. To identify racial interactions, we estimate models that include both student and classroom fixed effects and focus on students with limited' choice in courses. We find that the performance gap in terms of class dropout rates and grade performance between white and underrepresented minority students falls by 20 to 50 percent when taught by an underrepresented minority instructor. We also find these interactions affect longer-term outcomes such as subsequent course selection, retention, and degree completion.

Recent research has concluded that the children of business owners are substantially more likely than others to become self-employed themselves. The authors of this study find that more than half of business owners in the confidential, restricted-access 1992 Characteristics of Business Owners Survey had a self-employed family member before starting their business. Of the group with a self-employed family member, fewer than half had worked in that family member's business, suggesting that the intergenerational link in self-employment is not primarily due to the acquisition of general and specific business human capital. In contrast, the success of small businesses owned by those surveyed was only weakly correlated with having a self-employed family member, but strongly correlated with prior work experience in a family member's business, which is one method of acquiring general and specific business human capital. Another finding is that only 1.6% of the small businesses surveyed were inherited.

Estimates from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics indicate that African‐American men are one‐third as likely to be self‐employed as white men. The large discrepancy is due to a black transition rate into self‐employment that is approximately one‐half the white rate and a black transition rate out of self‐employment that is twice the white rate. Using a new variation of the Blinder‐Oaxaca decomposition technique, I find that racial differences in asset levels and probabilities of having self‐employed fathers explain a large part of the gap in the entry rate, but almost none of the gap in the exit rate.

Thirteen million people in the United States--roughly one in ten workers--own a business. And yet rates of business ownership among African Americans are much lower and have been so throughout the twentieth century. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, businesses owned by African Americans tend to have lower sales, fewer employees and smaller payrolls, lower profits, and higher closure rates. In contrast, Asian American-owned businesses tend to be more successful. In Race and Entrepreneurial Success, minority entrepreneurship authorities Robert Fairlie and Alicia Robb examine racial disparities in business performance. Drawing on the rarely used, restricted-access Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO) dataset compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, Fairlie and Robb examine in particular why Asian-owned firms perform well in comparison to white-owned businesses and black-owned firms typically do not. They also explore the broader question of why some entrepreneurs are successful and others are not.. After providing new comprehensive estimates of recent trends in minority business ownership and performance, the authors examine the importance of human capital, financial capital, and family business background in successful business ownership. They find that a high level of startup capital is the most important factor contributing to the success of Asian-owned businesses, and that the lack of startup money for black businesses (attributable to the fact that nearly half of all black families have less than $6,000 in total wealth) contributes to their relative lack of success. In addition, higher education levels among Asian business owners explain much of their success relative to both white- and African American-owned businesses. Finally, Fairlie and Robb find that black entrepreneurs have fewer opportunities than white entrepreneurs to acquire valuable pre-business work experience through working in family businesses.

Computers are an important part of modern education, yet many schoolchildren lack access to a computer at home. We test whether this impedes educational achievement by conducting the largest-ever field experiment that randomly provides free home computers to students.Although computer ownership and use increased substantially, we find no effects on any educational outcomes, including grades, test scores, credits earned, attendance, and disciplinary actions.Our estimates are precise enough to rule out even modestly-sized positive or negative impacts. Thestimated null effect is consistent with survey evidence showing no change in homework time or other \"intermediate\" inputs in education.

Theories of market failures and targeting motivate the promotion of entrepreneurship training programs and generate testable predictions regarding heterogeneous treatment effects from such programs. Using a large randomized evaluation in the United States, we find no strong or lasting effects on those most likely to face credit or human capital constraints, or labor market discrimination. We do find a short-run effect on business ownership for those unemployed at baseline, but this dissipates at longer horizons. Treatment effects on the full sample are also short-term and limited in scope: we do not find effects on business sales, earnings, or employees.

In contrast to the large and rapidly growing literature on information technology (IT) investments and firm productivity, we know very little about the role of personal computers in business creation. Using matched data from the 1997-2001 Computer and Internet Usage Supplements to subsequent Outgoing Rotation Group files from the Current Population Survey (CPS), I explore the relationship between computer ownership and entrepreneurship. Trends over the past two decades provide some evidence of a positive relationship between home computers and entrepreneurship rates, but the evidence is not clear. In contrast, an analysis of the relationship between computer ownership and entrepreneurship at the individual level provides evidence that individuals who had access to a home computer are substantially more likely to become entrepreneurs over the following 12-15 months. Probit and bivariate probit regressions also provide evidence of a strong positive relationship between computer ownership and entrepreneurship among women, but only limited evidence for men. Further, estimates from the CPS indicate that entrepreneurs who had prior access to home computers create a large variety of types of businesses and not only those in the IT industry.

The field of entrepreneurship is growing rapidly and expanding into new areas. This article presents a new compilation of administrative panel data on the universe of business start-ups in the United States, which will be useful for future research in entrepreneurship. To create the US start-up panel data set, the authors link the universe of non-employer firms to the universe of employer firms in the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD). Start-up cohorts of more than five million new businesses per year, which create roughly three million jobs, can be tracked over time. To illustrate the potential of the new start-up panel data set for future research, the authors provide descriptive statistics for a few examples of research topics using a representative start-up cohort.