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Credit and self-employment

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Author Info
Kartik Athreya
Ahmet Akyol

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Abstract

Limited personal liability for debts has long been justified as a tool to promote entrepreneurial risk taking by providing insurance to the borrower in the event of low returns. Nonetheless, such limits erode repayment incentives, and so may increase unsecured borrowing costs. Our paper is the first to evaluate the tradeoff between credit costs and insurance against failure. We build a life-cycle model with risky, and repeated, occupational choice in the presence of defaultable debt contracts. We find that limits to liability can encourage self-employment, and alter the timing, size, and financing of self-employment projects. We also find that the positive relationship between wealth and self-employment rates may not be evidence for credit constraints: We show that such a relationship is present even when limited liability is eliminated.

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Paper provided by Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond in its series Working Paper with number 09-05.

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Date of creation: 2009
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Handle: RePEc:fip:fedrwp:09-05

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Related research
Keywords: Bankruptcy ; Self-employed ; Insurance;

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References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
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    Other versions:
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    Other versions:
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    Other versions:
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  17. Ellen R. Rissman, 2006. "The self-employment duration of younger men over the business cycle," Economic Perspectives, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, issue Q III, pages 14-27. [Downloadable!]
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Full references

Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Césaire A. Meh & Yaz Terajima, 2008. "Unsecured Debt, Consumer Bankruptcy, and Small Business," Working Papers 08-5, Bank of Canada. [Downloadable!]
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