Tuesday, July 19, 2022

2005-2017: 6% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats became entrepreneurs; Republicans increase their relative entrepreneurship during Republican administrations and decrease it during Democratic administrations

Partisan Entrepreneurship. Joseph Engelberg, Jorge Guzman, Runjing Lu & William Mullins. NBER Working Paper 30249.DOI 10.3386/w30249. July 2022. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30249

Abstract: Republicans start more firms than Democrats. In a sample of 40 million party-identified Americans between 2005 and 2017, we find that 6% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats become entrepreneurs. This partisan entrepreneurship gap is time-varying: Republicans increase their relative entrepreneurship during Republican administrations and decrease it during Democratic administrations, amounting to a partisan reallocation of 170,000 new firms over our 13-year sample. We find sharp changes in partisan entrepreneurship around the elections of President Obama and President Trump, and the strongest effects among the most politically active partisans: those that donate and vote.


From 2019... Mental time travel and counterfactual thought: 6-year-olds but few younger children can reason counterfactually about past events

A taxonomy of mental time travel and counterfactual thought: Insights from cognitive development. Shalini Gautam et al. Behavioural Brain Research, Volume 374, November 18 2019, 112108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2019.112108


Abstract: Humans often engage in complex thought about the past, present, and future. They not only think about what did happen, is happening, and will happen, but also what did not happen, is not happening, and will not happen. Here we present an integrated taxonomy of mental time travel and counterfactual thought, in which event representations are assigned categorically distinct temporal locations (i.e., past, present, or future) and subjective propositional values (i.e., affirmed, negated, or uncertain). We review research on children’s developing abilities to generate and reason about event representations with these characteristics. We find that children’s development typically proceeds in three stages: (1) the capacity to imagine and reflect on affirmed and uncertain past, present, and future outcomes, (2) the capacity to imagine and reflect on counterfactual, negated versions of known past outcomes and present situations, and (3) the capacity to anticipate experiencing counterfactual emotions (i.e., regret and relief) in the future. This protracted developmental trajectory may be a function of increasing executive demands, increasing hierarchical complexity of temporal representations, or both.