In fragile communities where a high proportion of residents have limited opportunities for economic and social mobility, self-employment and entrepreneurship are possible pathways to economic and social mobility. If, for example, individuals perceive policing and offender sentencing as racially discriminatory and/or untrustworthy, criminal justice in fragile communities could potentially be a barrier to an individual’s decision to start a business, as such a decision can be sensitive to whether the legal system will protect individual property rights. This paper considers how, in fragile communities, individual fairness assessments and perceptions of the criminal justice system condition nascent entrepreneurship abandonment—individuals who considered starting a business but did not. With data from the Center for Advancing Opportunity Fragile Community Survey on over 5,000 individuals in the United States, we estimate latent variable specifications of abandoned individual aspirations to start a business as a function of several measures of their fairness assessment/perception of the criminal justice system. Parameter estimates reveal that the likelihood of abandoned nascent entrepreneurship increases with respect to increases in an individual’s assessment/perception that the criminal justice system is unfair in their community. Our results suggest that the criminal justice system is a barrier to entrepreneurship for residents of fragile communities, and that criminal justice reforms that promote fairness in policing and the courts could enhance economic and social mobility in fragile communities by increasing the likelihood of individuals starting businesses.

中文翻译：

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刑事司法系统是在脆弱社区创业的障碍吗？

在大部分居民经济和社会流动机会有限的脆弱社区中，自营职业和创业是实现经济和社会流动的可能途径。例如，如果个人认为警察和罪犯的判决具有种族歧视和/或不可信，那么脆弱社区中的刑事司法可能会成为个人决定创业的障碍，因为这样的决定可能对法律制度是否敏感将保护个人财产权。本文考虑了在脆弱的社区中，个人公平评估和对刑事司法系统的看法如何影响新生的创业放弃——那些考虑创业但没有创业的个人。借助促进机会脆弱社区中心对美国 5,000 多人的调查数据，我们估计了放弃个人创业愿望的潜在变量规格，作为他们对刑事司法系统的公平评估/感知的若干衡量标准的函数. 参数估计表明，放弃新生创业的可能性随着个人对刑事司法系统在其社区中的不公平的评估/感知的增加而增加。我们的研究结果表明，刑事司法系统是脆弱社区居民创业的障碍，