CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

Whose Job Is It Anyway? Co-Ethnic Hiring in New U.S. Ventures

March 2021

Abstract

Document Tags and Keywords

Similar Working Papers Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural network model know as Doc2Vec.

Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers. Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.

The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Whose Job Is It Anyway? Co-Ethnic Hiring in New U.S. Ventures' are listed below in order of similarity.

• Working Paper

  
  
  Immigration and Entrepreneurship in the United States
  

  December 2020

  Authors: Javier Miranda, J. Daniel Kim, Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin F. Jones

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-20-44

  Immigrants can expand labor supply and compete for jobs with native-born workers. But immigrants may also start new firms, expanding labor demand. This paper uses U.S. administrative data and other data sources to study the role of immigrants in entrepreneurship. We ask how often immigrants start companies, how many jobs these firms create, and how firms founded by native-born individuals compare. A simple model provides a measurement framework for addressing the dual roles of immigrants as founders and workers. The findings suggest that immigrants act more as 'job creators' than 'job takers' and play outsized roles in U.S. high-growth entrepreneurship.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  The Transformation of Self Employment
  

  February 2022

  Authors: William Kerr, Sari Pekkala Kerr, Innessa Colaiacovo, Margaret Dalton

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-22-03

  Over the past half-century, while self-employment has consistently accounted for around one in ten of the United States workforce, its composition has changed. Since 1970, industries with high startup capital requirements have declined from 53% of self-employment to 23%. This same time period also witnessed declines in 'hometown' local entrepreneurship and the probability of the self-employed being among top earners. Using 2016 data, we show that high startup capital requirements are linked with lower profitability at small scales. The transition away from high startup capital industries appears most closely linked to changes in small business production functions and less due to advantageous reallocation to other opportunities, growth in returns-to-scale among large businesses, or a worsening of financing conditions and debt levels.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Local Industrial Conditions and Entrepreneurship: How Much of the Spatial Distribution Can We Explain?
  

  October 2008

  Authors: Edward Glaeser, William Kerr

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-08-37

  Why are some places more entrepreneurial than others? We use Census Bureau data to study local determinants of manufacturing startups across cities and industries. Demo- graphics have limited explanatory power. Overall levels of local customers and suppliers are only modestly important, but new entrants seem particularly drawn to areas with many smaller suppliers, as suggested by Chinitz (1961). Abundant workers in relevant occupations also strongly predict entry. These forces plus city and industry fixed effects explain between sixty and eighty percent of manufacturing entry. We use spatial distributions of natural cost advantages to address partially endogeneity concerns.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Urban Immigrant Diversity and Inclusive Institutions
  

  January 2016

  Authors: Thomas Kemeny, Abigail Cooke

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-16-07

  Recent evidence suggests that rising immigrant diversity in cities offers economic benefits, including improved innovation, entrepreneurship and productivity. One potentially important but underexplored dimension of this relationship is how local institutional context shapes the benefits firms and workers receive from the diversity in their midst. Theory suggests that institutions can make it less costly for diverse workers to transact, thereby catalyzing the latent bene ts of heterogeneity. This paper tests the hypothesis that the effects of immigrant diversity on productivity will be stronger in locations featuring more 'inclusive" institutions. It leverages comprehensive longitudinal linked employer-employee data for the U.S. and two distinct measures of inclusive institutions at the metropolitan area level: social capital and pro- or anti-immigrant ordinances. Findings confirm the importance of institutional context: in cities with low levels of inclusive institutions, the benefits of diversity are modest and in some cases statistically insignificant; in cities with high levels of inclusive institutions, the benefits of immigrant diversity are positive, significant, and substantial. Moreover, natives residing in cities that have enacted laws restricting immigrants enjoy no diversity spillovers whatsoever, while immigrants in these cities continue to receive a diversity bonus. These results confirm the economic significance of urban immigrant diversity, while suggesting the importance of local social and economic institutions.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Spillovers from Immigrant Diversity in Cities
  

  November 2015

  Authors: Thomas Kemeny, Abigail Cooke

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-15-37

  Using comprehensive longitudinal matched employer-employee data for the U.S., this paper provides new evidence on the relationship between productivity and immigration spawned urban diversity. Existing empirical work has uncovered a robust positive correlation between productivity and immigrant diversity, supporting theory suggesting that diversity acts as a local public good that makes workers more productive by enlarging the pool of knowledge available to them, as well as by fostering opportunities for them to recombine ideas to generate novelty. This paper makes several empirical and conceptual contributions. First, it improves on existing empirical work by addressing various sources of potential bias, especially from unobserved heterogeneity among individuals, work establishments, and cities. Second, it augments identification by using longitudinal data that permits examination of how diversity and productivity co-move. Third, the paper seeks to reveal whether diversity acts upon productivity chiefly at the scale of the city or the workplace. Findings confirm that urban immigrant diversity produces positive and nontrivial spillovers for U.S. workers. This social return represents a distinct channel through which immigration generates broad-based economic benefits.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND URBAN GROWTH:AN EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT WITH HISTORICAL MINES
  

  April 2013

  Authors: Edward Glaeser, William Kerr, Sari Pekkala Kerr

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-13-15

  Measures of entrepreneurship, such as average establishment size and the prevalence of start-ups, correlate strongly with employment growth across and within metropolitan areas, but the endogeneity of these measures bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near Pittsburgh led that city to specialization in industries, like steel, with significant scale economies and that those big firms led to a dearth of entrepreneurial human capital across several generations. We test this idea by looking at the spatial location of past mines across the United States: proximity to historical mining deposits is associated with bigger firms and fewer start-ups in the middle of the 20th century. We use mines as an instrument for our entrepreneurship measures and find a persistent link between entrepreneurship and city employment growth; this connection works primarily through lower employment growth of start- ups in cities that are closer to mines. These effects hold in cold and warm regions alike and in industries that are not directly related to mining, such as trade, finance and services. We use quantile instrumental variable regression techniques and identify mostly homogeneous effects throughout the conditional city growth distribution.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Pirate's Treasure
  

  January 2017

  Authors: William F. Lincoln, Jenny X. Lin

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-17-51

  Do countries that improve their protection of intellectual property rights gain access to new product varieties from technologically advanced countries? We build the first comprehensive matched firm level data set on exports and patents using confidential microdata from the US Census to address this question. Across several different estimation approaches we find evidence that these protections affect where US firms export.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Agglomerative Forces and Cluster Shapes
  

  June 2012

  Authors: William Kerr, Scott Duke Kominers

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-12-09

  We model spatial clusters of similar firms. Our model highlights how agglomerative forces lead to localized, individual connections among firms, while interaction costs generate a defined distance over which attraction forces operate. Overlapping firm interactions yield agglomeration clusters that are much larger than the underlying agglomerative forces themselves. Empirically, we demonstrate that our model's assumptions are present in the structure of technology and labor flows within Silicon Valley and its surrounding areas. Our model further identifies how the lengths over which agglomerative forces operate influence the shapes and sizes of industrial clusters; we confirm these predictions using variations across both technology clusters and industry agglomeration.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Democratizing Entry: Banking Deregulations, Financing Constraints, and Entrepreneurship
  

  December 2007

  Authors: William Kerr, Ramana Nanda

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-07-33

  We study how US branch-banking deregulations affected the entry and exit of firms in the non-financial sector using establishment-level data from the US Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database. The comprehensive micro-data allow us to study how the entry rate, the distribution of entry sizes, and survival rates for firms responded to changes in banking competition. We also distinguish the relative effect of the policy reforms on the entry of startups versus facility expansions by existing firms. We find that the deregulations reduced financing constraints, particularly among small startups, and improved ex ante allocative efficiency across the entire firm-size distribution. However, the US deregulations also led to a dramatic increase in 'churning' at the lower end of the size distribution, where new startups fail within the first three years following entry. This churning emphasizes a new mechanism through which financial sector reforms impact product markets. It is not exclusively better ex ante allocation of capital to qualified projects that causes creative destruction; rather banking deregulations can also 'democratize' entry by allowing many more startups to be founded. The vast majority of these new entrants fail along the way, but a few survive ex post to displace incumbents.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---

• Working Paper

  
  
  Black Entrepreneurs, Job Creation, and Financial Constraints
  

  May 2021

  Authors: J. David Brown, John S. Earle, Mee Jung Kim, Kyung Min Lee

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-21-11

  Black-owned businesses tend to operate with less finance and employ fewer workers than those owned by Whites. Motivated by a simple conceptual framework, we document these facts and show they are causally connected using large firm-level surveys linked to universal employer data from the Census Bureau. We find that the racial financing gap is most pronounced at start-up and tends to narrow with firm age. At any age, Black-owned firms are less likely to receive bank loans, more likely to refrain from applying because they expect denial, and more likely to report that lack of finance reduces their profitability. Yet the observable characteristics of Black entrepreneurs are similar in most respects to Whites, and in some ways - higher education, growth-oriented motivations, and involvement in the business - would seem to imply higher, not lower, demand for finance. Concerning employment, we find that Black-owned firms have on average about 12 percent fewer employees than those owned by Whites, but the difference drops when controlling for firm age and other characteristics. However, when the analysis holds financial variables constant, the results imply that equally well-financed Black-owned rms would be larger than White-owned by about seven percent. Exploiting the credit supply shock of changing assignment to Community Reinvestment Act treatment through a Regression Discontinuity Design in a firm-level panel regression framework, we find that expanded credit access raises employment 5-7 percentage points more at Black-owned businesses than White-owned firms in treated neighborhoods.
  View Full Paper PDF

  ---