In the large literature on firm performance, economists have given little attention to entrepreneurs. We use deaths of more than 500 entrepreneurs as a source of exogenous variation, and ask whether this variation can explain shifts in firm performance. Using longitudinal data, we find large and...

The paper investigates the relationships between costs and user charges in the sewage industry in Norwegian local governments. The purpose of the analysis is to answer the following questions: (i) To what extent is a higher unit cost passed on to consumers in terms of a higher user charge? (ii)...

Exploiting changes in the geography of economic integration in Europe, this paper uses detailed bilateral trade data for 50 sectors to carry out an econometric ex post evaluation of the trade cost effects of the United Kingdom's various arrangements with the European Union. The analysis reveals...

Modern trade theory emphasizes firm-level productivity differentials to explain the cross-border activities of non-financial firms. This study tests whether a productivity pecking order also determines international banking activities. Using a novel dataset that contains all German banks'...

Insufficient capital buffers of banks have been identified as one main cause for the large systemic effects of the recent financial crisis. Although higher capital is no panacea, it yet features prominently in proposals for regulatory reform. But how do increased capital requirements affect...

Increasing wage inequality between similar workers plays an important role for overall inequality trends in industrialized societies. To analyze this pattern, we incorporate directed labor market search into a dynamic model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and homogeneous workers....

This paper combines representative worker-level data that cover time-varying job-level task characteristics of an economy over a long time span with sector-level bilateral trade data for merchandize and services. We carefully create longitudinally consistent workplace characteristics from the...