Labor economists increasingly work in empirical contexts with large numbers of unit-specific parameters. These settings include a growing number of value-added studies measuring causal effects of individual units like firms, managers, neighborhoods, teachers, schools, doctors, hospitals, police...

Categorical variables have no intrinsic ordering, and researchers often adopt a fixed-effect (FE) approach in empirical analysis. However, this approach has two significant limitations: it overlooks textual labels associated with the categorical variables; and it produces unstable results when...

Are fluctuations in firms' profitability risk a major cause of regular business cycles? We study this question within the framework of a heterogeneous-firm dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with fixed capital adjustment costs. In such a model, surprise increases of risk lead to a...

This paper studies how managers plan under uncertainty. In a new survey panel on German manufacturing firms, we show that uncertainty reflects change: Planning incorporates higher subjective uncertainty about future sales growth when the firm has just experienced unusual growth, and more so if...

We use payroll data on 1.2 million bank employee years in the Austrian, German, and Swiss banking sector to identify incentive pay in the critical banking segments of treasury/capital market management and investment banking for 66 banks. We document an economically significant correlation of...