We study the productivity of US owned plants in the UK. Using a new dataset that identifies foreign and domestic MNEs, we find that UK MNEs are less productive than US affiliates, but as productive as non US foreign affiliates. We investigate the source of the US and MNE advantage. We find...

Do variations in labor market institutions across countries affect the cross-border organization of the firm? Using firm-level data on multinationals located in France, we show that firms are more likely to outsource the production of intermediate inputs to external suppliers when importing from...

This paper shows that smoking intensity, i.e. the amount of nicotine extracted per cigarette smoked, responds to changes in excise taxes and tobacco prices. We exploit data covering the period 1988 to 2006 across many US states. Moreover, we provide new evidence on the importance of cotinine...

Theory predicts that optimal effective corporation tax rates will be negatively related to industry specific sunk costs, and hence industry concentration. Governments should tax industries with monopolistic power softly. Evidence suggests that this Schumpeterian (1942) principle of corporate...

Business support policies designed to raise productivity and employment are common worldwide, but rigorous micro-econometric evaluation of their causal effects is rare. We exploit multiple changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a major program to support manufacturing jobs...

We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied zone to prevent expropriation. We show that the regional location decisions...

This paper shows that smoking intensity, i.e. the amount of nicotine extracted per cigarette smoked, responds to changes in excise taxes and tobacco prices. We exploit NHANES data covering the period 1988 to 2006 across many US states. Moreover, using panel data from the Coronary Artery Risk...

Why are some countries so much richer than others? Development Accounting is a first-pass attempt at organizing the answer around two proximate determinants: factors of production and efficiency. It answers the question “how much of the cross-country income variance can be attributed to...

Banks operating under Value-at-Risk constraints give rise to a welldefined aggregate balance sheet capacity for the banking sector as a whole that depends on total bank capital. Equilibrium risk and market risk premiums can be solved in closed form as functions of aggregate bank capital. We...