Patel, PankajC., Rietveld, C.(. and Pereira, I. (2021). The relation between public assistance and self-employment in census tracts: a long-term perspective Journal of Evolutionary Economics.
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Affiliated author
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Publication year2021
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JournalJournal of Evolutionary Economics
We present evidence on the long-term relationship between the breadth (the proportion of households) and depth (the amount per household) of public assistance and the prevalence of self-employment in US neighbourhoods. The analysis of decennial data of 71,437 census tracts over four decades (1970 to 2000) shows that the poverty ratio lowers self-employment, and that breadth (but not depth) of public assistance mitigates the negative relationship between the poverty ratio and self-employment. The results are robust to alternate model specifications and are informative about the distributional effects of welfare spendings.