The Great Recession and its aftermath saw the worst relative performance of young firms in at least 35 years. More broadly, as we show, young-firm activity shares move strongly with local economic conditions and local house price growth. In this light, we assess the effects of housing prices and...

Immigration can expand labor supply and create greater competition for native-born workers. But immigrants may also start new firms, expanding labor demand. This paper uses U.S. administrative data and other data resources to study the role of immigrants in entrepreneurship. We ask how often...

We investigate the link between declining firm entry, aging incumbent firms and sluggish U.S. productivity growth. We provide a dynamic decomposition framework to characterize the contributions to industry productivity growth across the firm age distribution and apply this framework to the newly...

We study a fundamental reform of the public Disability Insurance (DI) system in Germany. Effective 2001, cohorts born after 1960 are no longer eligible for "occupational DI." Occupational DI (ODI) implies benefit eligibility when health shocks prevent employees from working in their previous...

Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income, the United States' two primary disability income support programs, each offer a pathway to public health insurance in addition to cash benefits. This implies that expansions in public health insurance availability, such as...

During the 1990s, while overall employment rates for working-aged men and women either remained roughly constant (men) or rose (women), employment rates for the disabled fell. During the same period the fraction of the working-aged population receiving Social Security Disability Insurance (DI)...

The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) requires employers to accommodate disabled workers and outlaws discrimination against the disabled in hiring, firing, and pay. Although the ADA was meant to increase employment of the disabled, it also increases costs for employers. The net theoretical...

This paper is an empirical investigation of the effect of poor early life-cycle health on post-secondary educational choices and outcomes. We use panel data for a sample of 10,430 individuals who were high school seniors in the spring of 1972, and who were re-surveyed in October of each year...

In the last twenty years the labor force participation rates of 45 to 54-year-old men have fallen 10.6 percentage points among non-whites and 4.4 percentage points among whites. I find that nearly half of this puzzling decline can be explained by the growth of the Social Security Disability...

This paper studies the optimal design of social insurance programs for disabled workers by developing and estimating an equilibrium labor search model with screening contracts. In the model, firms may strategically use employment contracts, consisting of wage and job amenities, to screen out the...