Nascent entrepreneurship, New venture creation, Occupational choice,

This study explores the simultaneous relationship between corporate cash holdings and dividend policy using a large sample of around 400 non-financial firms for the period from 1991 to 2008. The results show that cash holdings are affected by dividends, leverage, growth, size, risk, profitability, and working capital ratio. Dividend policy is affected by cash, leverage, growth, size, risk, and profit. When controlling for simultaneity, dividend payments do not appear to significantly affect cash holdings, nor do cash holdings affect dividend policy. The empirical analysis suggests that simultaneity is crucial in analyzing corporate cash holdings and dividend policy. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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We analyse the effects of wage uncertainty on the labour supply of self-employed workers, using PSID data on self-employed American males. The standard deviation of past wages, as a measure of wage uncertainty, is the key determinant of male self-employed labour supply, with a significant positive effect. In contrast there is no effect from the (instrumented) wage or other explanatory variables. Our findings are consistent with the self-employed 'self-insuring' in response to greater uncertainty by working longer hours, and they can also help explain why self-employed Americans work longer average hours for lower average wages than their employee counterparts.The self-employed account for around 10% of the workforce in most developed countries, employ a similar number of additional workers, and run most of these nations' firms (Parker, 2004). Despite this, relatively little is known about the labour supply of self-employed workers -partly, no doubt, because of data limitations pertaining to self-employed individuals. In contrast, there is an extensive and growing literature on the labour supply of employees (Blundell and MaCurdy, 1999). If for no other reason, the burgeoning policy interest centring on the promotion of entrepreneurship and labour market flexibility (with which the selfemployed are often associated) makes it timely to explore more closely what factors bear on the labour input of this important group of workers.Although pronounced, the literature's neglect of self-employed labour supply has not been complete. Early work by Wales (1973) estimated a simple static model of work hours using a sample of American self-employed proprietors. More recently, researchers have explored the labour supply behaviour of specific selfemployed occupations, including dentists (Boulier, 1979;Scheffler and Rossiter, 1983), physicians (Thornton, 1998), and taxi-drivers (Camerer et al., 1997. We depart from these studies by focusing on a factor that we argue is a particularly salient one for the self-employed: income risk. There is now clear evidence that self-employed workers have more variable and unequal incomes than employees do (Carrington et al., 1996;Parker, 1997). A separate body of evidence also shows that self-employed workers face a greater hazard of involuntary exit from their occupation (Evans and Leighton, 1989;Phillips and Kirchhoff, 1989;Taylor, 1999). That is a distinct form of risk that we do not focus on in this paper; nor shall we explore the decision to participate in self-employment instead of paid employment. Instead, we focus specifically on uncertainty of returns within selfemployment, and ask how this affects the labour supply of self-employed workers.

We investigate how politicians serving on the boards of directors influence firm performance. The results show a negative relationship between political connections and firm performance. Specifically, politically connected firms underperform nonconnected firms directors by almost 17 percent and 15 percent based on return on assets and return on equity, respectively. By stratifying the sample duration into two periods based on the political environment, we find that this effect is more pronounced in autocratic as opposed to democratic regimes. Finally, our results also suggest that the performance of connected firms with more growth opportunities is not affected by political connections.