There has been little rigorous evaluation of immigration barriers intended to improve domestic terms of employment by shrinking the workforce. We study one such barrier, a policy change that excluded almost half a million Mexican bracero seasonal agricultural workers from the United States....

This paper provides causal evidence of the impact of industrial policy on firms' long-term performance and quantifies industrial policy's long-term welfare effects. Using a natural experiment and unique historical data during the Heavy and Chemical Industry (HCI) Drive in South Korea, we find...

We revisit the long-standing empirical evidence of an inverse relationship between farm size and productivity using rich microdata from Uganda. We show that farm size is negatively related to yields (output per hectare), as commonly found in the literature, but positively related to farm...

We study a labor market equilibrium model in which firms sign optimal long-term contracts with workers. Firms that are financially constrained offer an increasing wage profile: They pay lower wages today in exchange of higher wages once they become unconstrained and operate at a larger scale. In...

We study whether workers progress up firm wage and size job ladders, and the cyclicality of this movement. Search theory predicts that workers should flow towards larger, higher paying firms. However, we see little evidence of a firm size ladder, partly because small, young firms poach workers...

We investigate whether the value of large banks, defined as banks with assets in excess of the Dodd-Frank threshold for enhanced supervision, increases with the size of their assets using Tobin's q and market-to-book as our valuation measures. Many argue that large banks receive subsidies from...

We examine whether startups attract employees with different pecuniary and non-pecuniary motives than small or large established firms. We then explore whether such differences in employee motives lead to differences in innovative performance across firm types. Using data on over 10,000 U.S. R&D...

We consider a tractable model of heterogeneous production units that features endogenous entry and productivity investment to assess the quantitative impact of policy distortions on aggregate output and establishment size. Relative to the standard factor misallocation framework, policy...