Self-employment, gender, financial knowledge, and high-cost borrowing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Poor financial decisions are a primary cause of small firm failure. This research therefore reports on an examination of antecedents behind questionable financial borrowing practices among self-employed individuals. Poor financial decisions are proxied as the use of high-cost short-term payday loans, check-cashing services, and the like (collectively, alternative financial services, AFS). More than 20 percent of self-employed individuals in the United States reported having borrowed from AFS providers, a practice that is arguably symptomatic of the poor financial decisions that could lead to business failure. Self-employed individuals, particularly those with high levels of financial self-efficacy (an attribute important to entrepreneurship) are particularly likely to employ AFS borrowing. Overconfident individuals, including self-employed individuals, comprise a disproportionate fraction of AFS users. This work also found that financial knowledge among self-employed people is, on average, no higher than that among employees, and low financial knowledge is also associated with AFS usage. Women, even though generally less financially knowledgeable than men, are relatively less likely than men to use AFS borrowing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".