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The purpose of this paper is to expand the empirical literature on state tax and expenditure policies and entrepreneurial activity in several meaningful ways.

The authors update the panel data to include several more recent years and also consider other elements of state policy.

The most important takeaway is that even after dealing with some of the known shortcomings of dynamic panel analysis, we are still not able to find economically meaningful impacts of state tax and expenditure policies (generally defined) on entrepreneurial performance.

Earlier studies that have found statistical significance have generally been limited to extensive-margin impacts on such things as self-employment rates or counts of new or small firms. When the authors examine what policy makers actually care about – things like income and employment among entrepreneurial ventures – the authors do not find much in the way of useful policy impacts.

To be sure, the authors find entrepreneurial performance to be statistically significantly related to certain tax rates and expenditure amounts, but the magnitudes of our estimated results cast serious doubts on the usefulness of these particular policy levers for generating meaningful improvements in entrepreneurial success.

The authors’ primary contribution is to improve the empirical consideration of the time series properties of the data. The authors provide a battery of more general and robust analyses to more completely surround the question.

We would like to offer our sincere thanks to all of the authors who worked diligently to contribute to this volume. We are deeply grateful for your willingness to share your thoughts, ideas, and passions. Thank you for participating in an effort to leave an intellectual legacy for generations to come.

Policy makers have long been interested in whether tax policies can be used to encourage entrepreneurial activity, but prior studies have produced ambiguous results. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether tax rates affect the decision to begin a new entrepreneurial venture.

The paper uses a 12-year panel of tax return data to examine the effects of tax rates on entrepreneurial entry. The paper calculates household-level tax rates and employ multiple measures of entrepreneurship.

The results offer evidence that cuts in relative tax rates faced by entrepreneurs, either in the form of higher rates for wage workers or lower rates for entrepreneurs, increase entry. The magnitudes of these effects suggest that an across the board tax cut would increase entry.

These results suggest that policy makers interested in entrepreneurial activity should account for the affects of tax policies on entrepreneurial activity in their decision making.

The data represent the most accurate publicly available tax information. We expand on previous work by recognizing that many entrepreneurial households also receive wage-and-salary income and addressing whether the effects differ by degree of entrepreneurship (e.g. full-time vs part-time). The analysis of households also includes a broader set of entrepreneurs than prior work, which has typically limited the sample to working-age male household heads. Ultimately, the paper finds robust results suggesting an effect opposite from much of the previous literature, but consistent with recent evidence on entrepreneurial exit decisions.

We examine whether variations in the most fundamental aspects of state corporate income tax regimes affect state economic activity as measured by personal income, gross state product, and total non-farm employment. We focus on a variety of statutory components of state corporate income taxes that apply broadly in most U.S. states and for most multi-state corporate taxpayers. Our econometric strategy consists of a series of fixed effects panel regressions using state-level data from 1996 through 2010. Our results reveal important interaction effects of tax rates and policies, suggesting that policy makers should avoid making decisions about tax rates in isolation. The results demonstrate a relatively consistent negative economic response to the combination of high tax rates with throwback rules and heavy sales factor weights. Combined reporting has no discernible effect on personal income, GSP, or employment after controlling for tax rates, apportionment, and throwback rules. In an effort to gauge the relative impacts of tax policies on the location of economic activity, we also estimate alternative models in which each state’s economic activity is measured as a share of the national economic activity in each year. Statistically significant effects for tax rates, apportionment formulas, and throwback rules in the shares models suggest that at least some of their impact involves the movement of activity across state lines, thereby leaving open the possibility of a zero-sum game among the states.

The IT sector lost both workers and output following the dot‐com crash of 2000. Despite this loss of employment and earnings, information technology has become a more ubiquitous part of commerce and daily activities. This division between observed use of IT and industry growth is due both to the changing nature of IT investment towards emerging media and the changes in the structure of occupational deployment within firms. This paper describes the type and growth of emerging media with particular emphasis on growth of interactivity applications. This is followed by a description of occupational and skill shifts within traditional firms and the IT sector. We conclude that growth in emerging media occupations and skills represent a significant change in the labor force composition of both IT and traditional firms. The IT sector may be stagnant, but workers who deploy and employ IT related (primarily emerging media) applications is rising. Finally, we trace the value chain of emerging media and outline how it may affect the geography of new firm development.