This paper examines the performance of the German economy and the role of the regulation and welfare state policies in affecting its performance. While the German economy is still strong, incentives in place are likely to impair future German competitiveness and productivity

This paper presents an analysis of employment and compensation practices under alternative institutions of municipal government which demonstrates that institutional variations have significant, important, and predictable effects upon outcomes in municipal labor markets. Municipal institutions...

This essay describes and evaluates state and local business tax incentives in the United States. In 2014, states spent between $5 and $216 per capita on incentives for firms in the form of firm-specific subsidies and general tax credits, which mostly target investment, job creation, and research...

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) aimed to quickly deliver hundreds of billions of dollars of loans to small businesses, with the loans administered via private banks. In this paper, we use firm-level data to document the demand and supply of PPP funds. Using an instrumental variables...

During the 1930s the federal government embarked upon an ambitious series of grant programs designed to counteract the Great Depression. The amounts distributed varied widely across the country and potentially contributed to population shifts. We estimate an aggregate discrete choice model, in...

Most of the estimated effects are small and the signs are not wholly consistent with either model, under the null hypothesis that agriculture was the chief beneficiary of rail access. For example, we find that rail access appears to have increased urbanization, raised the likelihood of...

Theories featuring multiple equilibria are now widespread across many fields of economics. Yet little empirical work has asked if such multiple equilibria are salient features of real economies. We examine this in the context of the Allied bombing of Japanese cities and industries in WWII. We...