HKS Affiliated Authors

Excerpt

Cities Need To Encourage Entrepreneurship, Not Class Warfare. Edward Glaeser, December 1, 2015, Opinion. "Urban America's problems of poverty and joblessness are real. Progressives have been elected to address those problems, but their simple big-government solutions -- updated but essentially the same as those tried in the past -- are almost sure to fail. We need a more forward-looking urban-policy approach.  While many agree that entrepreneurship is good for cities and their residents, little consensus exists about what policymakers can do to promote it, especially in high-poverty areas. Public loans or loan guarantees for entrepreneurs are the most commonly applied policies. Unfortunately, we have no examples of truly randomized lending, which is what would be necessary in order to evaluate whether the government loan programs worked. Absent such experiments, the best we can do is compare companies that received such aid with similar firms that didn't, and see how they fared ..." Link