Morning Must-Read: Walter Frick: Social Insurance and Surmounting Anti-Entrepreneurial Job Lock

**Walter Frick: If Your Kids Get Free Health Care, You’re More Likely to Start a Company: “Starting a business is risky enough in the best of circumstances…

…Most new ventures fail, and the prospect of forgoing a salary is enough to keep many would-be entrepreneurs from taking the plunge. But think about how much harder it would be if your child had a health condition, and you couldn’t get her insurance if you struck out on your own. That’s less of a problem in the U.S. than it was a few years ago, thanks to Obamacare, but until recently it was a very real conundrum…. Gareth Olds of Harvard Business School… analyzed Census data from before and after the passage of the Children’s Health Insurance Program in the U.S…. The self-employment rate for CHIP recipients increased from just under 15% of those eligible to over 18%. That amounts to an a 23% increase. The rate of ownership of incorporated businesses–a better proxy for sustainable, growth entrepreneurship–increased even more dramatically, from 4.3% to 5.8%, an increase of 31%…. The basic intuition behind his methods is that a family just above the CHIP cutoff isn’t all that different from a family just below it…

September 8, 2014

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