Low unionization rates, a falling real federal minimum wage, and outsourcing have hampered wage growth in the low-wage sector in the US. In recent years, a number of private employers have opted to institute or raise company-wide minimum wages for their employees, sometimes in response to public...

In the past several decades, the U.S. economy has witnessed a number of striking trends that indicate a rising market concentration and a slowdown in business dynamism. In this paper, we make an attempt to understand potential common forces behind these empirical regularities through the lens of...

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 use Norwegian administrative data and applications for emergency government support to simulate magnitude and distribution of business revenue shock due to the Covid-19 pandemic. We rely on it to analyze the impact of business support policies available in Norway and the United States by...

The financial decisions of durable goods makers can impose spillovers on their consumers. Namely, durable goods provide a consumption stream that frequently depends on services provided by the manufacturer (e.g., warranties, parts, and maintenance). Manufacturer bankruptcy, or even the...

This paper assesses the relative importance of various explanations for the gender gap in career outcomes for highly-educated workers in the U.S. corporate and financial sectors. The careers of MBAs, who graduated between 1990 and 2006 from a top U.S. business school, are studied to understand...

Racial social isolation within and across workplaces may reduce firm productivity. We provide descriptive evidence that African-Americans feel socially isolated from Whites. To test whether isolation affects productivity, we estimate models of Total Factor Productivity for manufacturing firms...

What type of businesses do unions target for organizing? A dynamic model of the union organizing process is constructed to answer this question. A union monitors establishments in an industry to learn about their productivity, and decides which ones to organize and when. An establishment becomes...

We study the impact of skilled immigrants on the employment structures of U.S. firms using matched employer-employee data. Unlike most previous work, we use the firm as the lens of analysis to account for a greater level of heterogeneity and the fact that many skilled immigrant admissions are...

China's admission into the WTO in 2001 heralded a new era of globalization, increasing both import competition in domestic markets and foreign opportunities for US firms. In the aggregate, the average annual profitability of US public firms during the post globalization period (2003-2019)...