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Cross-country studies have shown that higher costs to starting a business tend to reduce entrepreneurship (Chambers and Munemo, 2019) and that an unfavorable environment for business can increase poverty and income inequality (Chambers et al., 2019a; Djankov et al., 2018). Building on the current literature, the authors test whether barriers to starting a business at the state and city level in the USA are associated with changes in entrepreneurship and income inequality.

Measures of entrepreneurship (establishment entry rate and exit rate) are regressed on measures of barriers to entry in a cross-section of 50 states as well as a cross-section of 73 cities in the USA. Further, the authors regress measures of income inequality on measures of barriers to entry using the same two cross-sections. State level data on barriers to entry are from Teague (2016), published in the Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy. City level data on barriers to starting a business are from the Doing Business in North America (DBNA) dataset.

Results show that there is a negative and significant association between barriers to starting a business and the rate of firm exit. A standard deviation increase in barriers to entry is associated with a five percent decrease in the firm exit rate at the state level. The authors find only limited evidence that barriers to entry are associated with income inequality.

Despite a large volume of scholarship on how regulation and barriers to entry influence entrepreneurship, no study (to the authors’ knowledge) has investigated how general entry regulation affects the entry or exit rate of establishments at the state or municipal level in the USA.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) on farm sector wage rate. This identification strategy rests on the assumption that all districts across India would have had similar wage trends in the absence of the program. The author argues that this assumption may not be true due to non-random allocation of districts to the program’s three phases across states and different economic growth paths of the states post the implementation of NREGS.

To control for overall macroeconomic trends, the author allows for state-level time fixed effects to capture the differences in growth trajectories across districts due to changing economic landscape in the parent-state over time. The author also estimates the expected farm sector wage growth due to the increased public work employment provision using a theoretical model.

The results, contrary to the existing studies, do not find support for a significantly positive impact of NREGS treatment on private cultivation wage rate. The theoretical model also shows that an increase in public employment work days explains very little of the total growth in cultivation wage post 2004.

This paper looks specifically at farm sector wage growth and the possible impact of NREGS on it, accounting for state specific factors in shaping farm wages. Theoretical estimates are presented to overcome econometric limitations.

The long-debated impact of right-to-work (RTW) laws took on more urgency with the passage of RTW in additional states in the twenty-first century. The impact of RTW on shareholder wealth of corporations located in four states is evaluated here: Oklahoma (2000), Indiana (2012), Michigan (2012), and Wisconsin (2015). Event study results show that RTW had a positive effect on shareholder wealth in these states, albeit an effect that was lower in Michigan than elsewhere. We argue that this is indirect evidence in support of research indicating that RTW hinders union organizing, raises profits, and reduces nonunion employee compensation.

This paper assesses the efficacy of the 18 small business development centers (SBDCs) located throughout the state of Pennsylvania during 2013–2016 as a proxy for publicly funded, small business consulting services in general.

The paper compares the sales growth of SBDC clients, as reported in postconsultation surveys, to comparable growth measures for the corresponding business population using one- and two-sample t-tests.

The results show that respondent clients with existing businesses clearly outperform the broader population following consultation, both in aggregate and when decomposed by region and industry.

Although the best available data, the results are tempered by low response rates and self-reporting.

The paper empirically demonstrates that SBDC clients experience higher growth in sales and employment following their consultation than the broader business population. The net benefit of such services is, however, impossible to determine.

Apart from providing theoretical clarity, the present research aims to validate empirically that the EPU will be adversely affecting these key macroeconomic variables and that managing EPU matters for economic policymaking in Nigeria.

A dynamic autoregressive distributed lag regression model is employed to analyse the relationship from 1990 to 2020. Based on the theory of multiplier effect, the analysis could examine the positive and negative changes in policy uncertainty, as well as the reliability in macroeconomic activities such as unemployment, infrastructure development and foreign direct investment inflows.

The findings revealed EPU is cointegrated with the key economic variables in focus. Further, the negative impact of EPU on corporate investment in FDI and positive impact of EPU on unemployment confirm for both short and long-run. However, the impact of EPU on government investment in infrastructure development is found to be positive which does not confirm the expected hypothesis.

Dynamic relationship between policy uncertainty and macroeconomic activities in Nigeria seems to exist. Taking risky decisions has impact and causing a high unemployment rate, poor infrastructural development and lower foreign direct investment inflows in the country.

Policy uncertainty in Nigeria is determining. Despite that, very little research found that rising uncertainty issues may significantly affect unemployment, investment in infrastructure and foreign direct investment inflows adversely. Therefore, policy uncertainty is an open space for economic activities to thrive in Nigeria, especially unemployment.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-08-2022-0555

The paper aims to highlight differences in bank performance based on state politics during the onset of the Covid pandemic. The response to Covid pandemic created an unusual opportunity for an investigation of how politics impacts banking due to the initial response to the pandemic being heavily impacted by political affiliation states' governors and dominant parties in state legislatures. Previous research looked at impact of elections on the federal level (both executive and legislative branches) on bank risk and performance. The response to the Covid pandemic in 2020 allows for an investigation on how political influence on the state level impacted banks performance.

The Covid pandemic was an unexpected storm that entered the United States with a vengeance in 2020, taking countless lives and ravaging the economic landscape. The response to the pandemic quickly took a political spin as republican governors showed greater reluctance to shutter business activity in hopes of slowing down the spread of the virus than their democratic counterparts. This paper examines the impact of the two Americas created along the lines of political influence as it impacted bank performance over four-quarters beginning with the fourth quarter of 2019. All US banks are split into groups based on the political affiliation of state governors and the dominant party in state legislatures to measure impact of politics on bank performance and risk.

This research finds that banks operating in states with republican governors produced greater profits and exhibited higher liquidity levels. The same results held for banks in states where both the governorship and the legislature were controlled by republicans versus banks in states where both the governor and the legislature were democratic. Interestingly, the findings present a reversal when examining banks in states led by republican governors and democratic legislatures versus banks in states with democratic governors and republican legislatures. In those instances of mixed leadership, banks in states with democratic governors tend to show greater profits, greater liquidity while demonstrating lower asset quality.

A paper published in Managerial Finance in 2018 discussed the impact of the parties in control of the White house and the legislative branch on bank performance and risk. There have been no studies, to the author’s knowledge, that look at how states' political leadership (gubernatorial and legislative) impact on bank performance. Because the response to the Covid pandemic became a politically polarized issue, the onset of the crisis allowed for measurement of how different responses by republican and democratic state leadership impacted bank performance and risk.

Over the past three decades, the U.S. economy experienced a sharp increase in the labor-force participation of women, causing a similar increase in the demand for non-parental child care. Concurrent with these developments has been a dramatic rise in the prevalence of childhood obesity, prompting the question as to what extent the increase in child-care utilization is responsible for the growth in obesity. This chapter examines the impact of various child-care arrangements on school-age children's weight outcomes using panel data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). An advantage of the ECLS-K for our purposes is that it tracks children's child-care arrangements between Kindergarten and the 5th grade. Our fixed-effects' results suggest that non-parental child-care arrangements are not strongly associated with children's weight outcomes. Our findings are robust to numerous sensitivity and subgroup analyses.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether entrepreneurship is a significant factor in explaining economic growth at the state level.

This paper, unlike previous work, uses the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity (KIEA) as the measure of entrepreneurial activity. Based on standard growth regressions using real per capita gross state product, real per capita personal income and employment growth, we test for the independent role that entrepreneurial activity may have on state economic growth.

We find that an increase in the level of entrepreneurial activity is robustly associated with an increase in economic growth. Such findings reinforce calls for policy changes at the state level that promote more productive entrepreneurship.

These conclusions are tentative. The findings are based on the growth of the 50 states over a relatively short period. A longer data set would be preferable, if data were available. Moreover, the author has not attempted to distinguish between different categories of entrepreneurship, for example productive and unproductive entrepreneurship.

Such findings reinforce calls for policy changes at the state level that promote more productive entrepreneurship. This would include, among others, changes such as reducing or eliminating state income taxes and setting strict limits on the government's use of eminent domain and environmental property takings.

The study uses the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity (KIEA), arguably a superior measure of state‐level entrepreneurial activity, to explain state economic growth. The topic is timely and the results have important policy implications.

This paper examines the conditions under which states include sexual orientation as a protected status in hate crime policy over the course of 25 years. Previous research in this area has generally focused on the passage of either general hate crime statutes longitudinally or the inclusion of sexual orientation in hate crime legislation via cross-sectional analysis. Moreover, previous work in this area tends to concentrate on two types of factors affecting policy passage: (1) structural factors such as social disorganization and economic vitality, and (2) political characteristics including governor’s political party and the makeup of the state legislature. We argue that a strong LGBT social movement organizational presence may also influence LGBT hate crime policy passage. Using an event history analysis, we test how state-level social movement organizational mobilization, as well as the state-level political context, affect policy passage from 1983 to 2008. Our findings indicate that political opportunities, including political instability and government ideology, matter for the passage of anti-gay hate crime policy. We also find evidence to support political mediation, as the interaction between social movement organizational presence and Democrats in the state legislature affect policy passage.