Start-ups and other entrepreneurial ventures make a significant contribution to the US economy, particularly in the tech sector, where they comprise some of the largest and most influential companies. Yet for every high-profile, high-growth company like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google, many more fail. This enormous heterogeneity poses conceptual and measurement challenges for economists concerned with understanding their precise impact on economic growth. Measuring Entrepreneurial Businesses brings together economists and data analysts to discuss the most recent research covering three broad themes. The first chapters isolate high- and low-performing entrepreneurial ventures and analyze their roles in creating jobs and driving innovation and productivity. The next chapters turn the focus on specific challenges entrepreneurs face and how they have varied over time, including over business cycles. The final chapters explore core measurement issues, with a focus on new data projects under development that may improve our understanding of this dynamic part of the economy.

Recent research documents increasing income inequality in the United States in particular, a widening gap between well-educated and less-educated American workers. But income is not the sole measure of prosperity. The amount of time Americans spend in leisure is also crucial to our understanding of American well-being, changes in well-being over time, and differences in well-being among citizens. This meticulously-researched monograph examines trends in leisure inequality to present a more complete picture of prosperity in America. Using data spanning forty years and tens of thousands of survey respondents, Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst seek to answer several key questions about leisure inequality: How much has the leisure time of the average American increased or decreased over the last several decades? What increases or decreases in leisure time are seen across groups with different levels of education, and to what extent do educational differences in employment status account for these changes? That is, if workers with relatively little education are less likely to be employed today than twenty years ago, does that explain an increase in their leisure relative to more-educated workers? Aguiar and Hurst find that the leisure time of the average American has risen by about four hours per week since the mid-1960s. Moreover, the leisure gap between the less educated and more educated has widened, as leisure time has increased by eight hours for Americans without a high school diploma and decreased by six hours for college-educated Americans. What accounts for this puzzling divergence? Understanding the forces that drive increasing leisure inequality could have important implications for American employment policy.

The NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2021 presents research-central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. Robert Hall and Marianna Kudlyak examine unemployment dynamics during economic recoveries. They present new empirical findings and explore models in which the labor market gradually draws down the stock of unemployed workers in the aftermath of a downturn. Titan Alon, Sena Coskun, Matthias Doepke, David Koll, and Michèle Tertilt analyze the relative decline in employment of women during the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated global recession. They show that increased childcare needs, which fell more heavily on women, and differences in occupations both contributed. In the case of the US, however, each of these factors account for less than 20% of the gender gap in hours worked during the pandemic. Richard Rogerson and Johanna Wallenius study the employment rates of older workers in OECD countries over the last forty years. An expansion of institutions incentivizing retirement, concurrent with negative aggregate shocks between 1970 and 1995, led to falling employment rates. This trend started to reverse in the mid-1990s when many of these institutions, such as public pension programs, were cut back. Michael Barnett, William Brock, and Lars Peter Hansen explore the consequences of risk, ambiguity, and model misspecification in climate policy design. They consider carbon emissions pricing and the effects of different sources of uncertainty—such as future information about environmental damage, uncertainties in carbon and temperature dynamics and damage functions, and the role of future green technologies—on policy design. Michael Kremer, Jack Willis, and Yang You present new evidence suggesting a steady trend toward income convergence across countries since the late 1980s. They find convergence in various determinants of economic growth across countries and a flattening of the relationship between growth and these determinants. The paper challenges theories of growth arising after earlier rejections of the neoclassical growth model.

Overcoming Barriers to Entrepreneurship compiles academic discussions of real and perceived barriers to the founding and running of small businesses in America. Each chapter illustrates how policy and economic environment can hinder business owners, and suggests what can be done to help them. Starting with venture capital access in Silicon Valley during the Internet bubble, the book goes on to question the link between personal wealth and entrepreneurship, to investigate how federal tax rates effect small-business creation and destruction, to explain the low rate of self-employment among Mexican immigrants, and to suggest how pension coverage can be increased in small businesses. Concluding with an attempt to qualify what makes an entrepreneur, Overcoming Barriers to Entrepreneurship argues that policymakers need not create incentives for entrepreneurs to create new businesses, though there is a great deal they can do to encourage entrepreneurs by removing legal and economic roadblocks to business creation.

Overcoming Barriers to Entrepreneurship compiles academic discussions of real and perceived barriers to the founding and running of small businesses in America. Each chapter illustrates how policy and economic environment can hinder business owners, and suggests what can be done to help them. Starting with venture capital access in Silicon Valley during the Internet bubble, the book goes on to question the link between personal wealth and entrepreneurship, to investigate how federal tax rates effect small-business creation and destruction, to explain the low rate of self-employment among Mexican immigrants, and to suggest how pension coverage can be increased in small businesses. Concluding with an attempt to qualify what makes an entrepreneur, Overcoming Barriers to Entrepreneurship argues that policymakers need not create incentives for entrepreneurs to create new businesses, though there is a great deal they can do to encourage entrepreneurs by removing legal and economic roadblocks to business creation.

NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2020 presents research by leading scholars on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. George-Marios Angeletos, Zhen Huo, and Karthik Sastry ask how to model expectations without rational expectations. They find that in response to business cycle shocks, expectations underreact initially but eventually overshoot, which in their view favors models with dispersed, noisy information and overextrapolation of expectations. Next, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Pierre-Daniel Sarte, and Nicholas Trachter contrast the patterns of rising aggregate firm market concentration with falling market concentration over time at the local level. Some associate rising concentration with less competition and more market power, but because most product markets are local, studying changes in local competition, as opposed to trends in aggregate competition, provides important insights. Adam Guren, Alisdair McKay, Emi Nakamura, and Jón Steinsson develop a novel econometric procedure to recover structural parameters using cross-region variation, for example, to estimate direct effects of housing wealth changes on individual household consumption. To avoid confounding direct and indirect effects, the authors isolate the direct effect of house price changes on consumption by using other estimates of demand multipliers from the local government spending literature to deflate estimates of the total effect of local consumption on local house prices. Peter Klenow and Huiyu Li examine the sources of reduced productivity growth by quantifying the contribution of innovation to economic growth. They find that young firms generate roughly half the productivity growth, most of the changes in productivity during the mid-1990s are accounted for by older firms, and most growth results from quality improvements on incumbents’ own products. In the fifth chapter, Fatih Guvenen, Greg Kaplan, and Jae Song use detailed micro panel data from the Social Security Administration to assess the progress women have made into the top 1% and top 0.1% of the income distribution over time. Finally, Joachim Hubmer, Per Krusell, and Anthony Smith Jr. explore the reasons for growing wealth inequality across the developed world. They argue that the significant drop in tax progressivity starting in the late 1970s was the most important source of growing wealth inequality in the United States. The sharp observed increases in earnings inequality and the falling labor share cannot account for the bulk of the increase in wealth inequality.