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We suggest that a political leader or a political administration can be described in terms of a public sector entrepreneurship framework. To illustrate, we define the actions of US President Donald Trump’s Administration to refocus the emphasis of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as an innovative public policy initiative. And, we explore empirically the social consequences of those actions in terms of changes in the number of STEM employees at the EPA and the number of attendant innovative scientific publications. We find that declining experienced STEM employees at the EPA during President Trump’s Administration is associated with declining innovative environmental scientific publications. Declining experienced STEM employees at the EPA during President Donald Trump’s Administration is associated with declining innovative environmental scientific publications. A public sector entrepreneur is an individual who champions an innovative public policy. In this paper we propose that President Trump’s Administration’s policies toward the EPA during his administration were innovative, although different from that of previous administrations. These policies sought to reorient the EPA toward industrial and industry-friendly interests which was contrary to the agency’s health and environmental missions. One response to the administration’s new policies was that experienced STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) employees left the EPA. A social consequence of the departure of experienced STEM employees is that the number of environmentally related scientific publications—one indicator of an agency’s innovative activity—from EPA scientists declined. An implication from our empirical findings is that not all public sector entrepreneurial actions are socially desirable; some have potentially detrimental short-run and possible long-run effects on society as a whole.

We explore the innovative performance of firms resulting from their Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) research-funded projects in terms of the gender dynamics of the firms. Using commercialization as the relevant performance metric, we find that Phase II projects led by a female principal investigator (PI) have greater probability of being commercialized in female-owned firms than in male-owned firms. This result is consistent with the findings from other settings that females tend to perform better when working under a female supervisor.

This paper examines the phenomenon of uncompensated long hours in jobs with pro‐social characteristics and presents evidence that long‐hour wage premiums and occupational social value are substitutes in compensating salaried workers who supply hours exceeding the standard working week. I show that the social value of an occupation—in particular the degree to which jobs involve helping or providing service to others—is inversely related to long‐hour pay. Allowing for heterogeneity in the degree to which workers value their job's helping orientation lets me explore how gender differences in employees’ attitudes toward pro‐social behaviour can explain some of the observed occupational sorting trends and gender differences in long‐hour compensation. Women tend to be more strongly drawn to ‘helping’ occupations and at the same time receive lower long‐hour premiums in these jobs relative to men. I offer a theoretical framework to rationalize the empirical trends.

Asking students to come to class prepared is quite common in undergraduate and graduate education. We use a quasiexperimental design to assess whether requiring undergraduate students in an introductory course to review prior to lecture the material that will be taught in class enhances their understanding of key concepts. We find that requiring rather than recommending preparation before class increases exam scores by about a quarter of a standard deviation, or roughly a third of a letter grade, for students in the second and third quartiles of the ability distribution but has little impact on very high‐ or low‐ability students. We also estimate local average treatment effects, from which we draw a similar conclusion: reviewing the material before lecture benefits students in the middle of the ability distribution but has essentially no impact on the top and bottom quartiles.

I examine the relationship between student loans and marital status among individuals considering or pursuing graduate management education. Using data from a panel survey of registrants for the Graduate Management Admission Test, I show that the amount of accumulated student debt is negatively related to the probability of first marriage. The strength of the relationship diminishes with age, more so for women than for men. At the median age for the sample (24 years at test registration), the estimated decrease over a seven-year period is between 3 and 4 percentage points per $10,000 in student debt for men and a percentage point lower in absolute value for women. I use information on reported marriage expectations to show evidence that education expenditures and the amount of debt are correlated with anticipated marital status, but borrowers may not have perfect foresight about the long-term consequences of accumulating student debt.

This paper assesses the R&D performance of nascent and established technology-based small firms that receive a Phase II R&D award from the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Our empirical analysis is based on a two-stage selection probit model, which is used to estimate the probability of commercialization conditional on the Phase II project having not failed. Our model predicts, and our analysis confirms, that nascent firms are more likely to fail in their SBIR-supported R&D endeavors. Further, we find that nascent firms that do not fail have a higher probability of commercializing their developed technology.

The role of gender in entrepreneurship has been thoroughly investigated. However, less is known about gender differences in access to private investment when attempting to develop a new technology. In this paper, we use data collected by the National Research Council of the National Academies to estimate differences between the probability that a female-owned firm and a male-owned firm, both conducting research funded by the Small Business Innovation Research program, will receive private investment funding to help to commercialize the funded technology. We find that female-owned firms are disadvantaged in their access to private investment, especially in the West and Northeast regions of the USA.

We introduce the idea that easily inferable demographic characteristics such as gender may not be sufficient to define type in the supervisor-employee mentoring relationship. We use longitudinal data on athletic directors at NCAA Division I programs to identify through observed mobility the propensity of top-level administrators to hire and retain female head coaches, above and beyond an organization's culture. We show that supervisor gender appears to be unrelated to female friendliness in this setting. Overall, our findings indicate that more focus should be placed on the more complex manager type defined by attitudes in addition to attributes.

Numerous studies have examined the enrollment responses of traditional undergraduate students to the introduction of government-provided tuition subsidies, but far less attention has been devoted to the elasticity of demand for graduate education. This paper examines how the tax code and government education policies affect graduate enrollment and persistence rates along with the ways in which students fund their graduate education. Our empirical methodology is based on exogenous variations in the availability of an income tax exemption for employer- provided tuition assistance for graduate courses. We find that graduate attendance among full-time workers age 24-30 is higher when the tax exemption is available, mostly due to higher persistence in public universities and vocational course work. The use of employer aid for individuals enrolled in full-time and public part-time graduate programs also increases. We present some evidence that universities may adjust tuition to capture part of the incidence.

This study establishes empirically a positive but nonlinear relationship between weekly hours and hourly wage growth. For workers who put in over 47 hours per week, 5 extra hours are associated with a 1% increase in annual wage growth. This correlation is not present when hours are lower. The relationship is especially strong for young professionals. Data on promotions provide evidence in support of a job-ladder model that combines higher skill sensitivity of output in higher-level jobs with heterogeneous preferences for leisure. The results can be used to account for part of the gender wage gap.

This paper links inherent mobility to observed schooling choices. A job search model with graduate education predicts that more mobile workers are more likely to enroll in full-time MBA programs. Adding to the literature on employer-sponsored general training, the model predicts that employers are likely to provide tuition assistance to workers who find quits costly. I use a panel survey of GMAT registrants to test some of the empirical implications of the model. I show that observable measures of job attachment are correlated with the probability of attending part-time and, conditional on part-time attendance, with the likelihood of receiving tuition reimbursement.

There is much discussion in the popular press about how consumers adjust their purchase decisions for items from lattes and restaurant meals to which type of meat to purchase for dinner during times of rising fuel prices. 1 While analysts ascribe declines in retail sector profits when fuel prices rise to changes in demand elasticity, most empirical analysis of consumer choice for such daily items abstracts from inter- temporal income effects. Instead, fuel prices are used in demand estimation as exogenous shifters of production costs, and therefore valid instruments for identifying demand parameters. Though introspection and popular press suggest that sharp changes in fuel costs may shift price sensitivity in nonfuel purchases through an income effect, little empirical work has been done to estimate or quantify this effect. 2

Using project data from a random sample of Phase II research awards from the National Institutes of Health SBIR program, we estimate the relative probability that woman-owned firms are able to attract private investments to fund the transition of the technology developed under the sponsorship of the SBIR program to an innovation to enter the market. We find that womenowned firms are as much as 16 percentage points less likely to attract private investment dollars compared to male-owned firms, factors excluding the size of the SBIR award held constant. Women-owned firms that received larger awards performed substantially better. Although the SBIR program has a legislated directive to increase the participation of woman-owned firms in the program, our findings suggest that it might not be sufficient to overcome market perceptions about the profitability of such investments actually bringing a developed technology to market.