The 2007-2009 recession is characterized by: a large drop in employment, an unprecedented decline in firm entry, and a slow recovery. Using confidential firm-level data, I show that financial constraints reduced employment growth in small relative to large firms by 4.8 to 10.5 percentage points....

Exploiting the differential financing needs across industrial sectors, this paper shows that financing constraints of small businesses in the United States are one of the drivers explaining the unemployment dynamics during the Great Recession. We show that workers in small firms are more likely...

We examine the role of firms' government connections, defined by government intervention in CEO appointment and the status of state ownership, in determining the severity of financial constraints faced by Chinese firms. We demonstrate that government connections are associated with substantially...

a speech at the C. Peter McColough Roundtable Series on International Economics, Council on Foreign Relations, New York, New York, January 19, 2005, and at the C. Peter McColough Roundtable Series on International Economics, Council on Foreign Relations, New York, New York, on January 19, 2005

a speech before Leadership South Carolina, Greenville, South Carolina