Local governments can provide services with their own employees or by contracting with private or public sector providers. We develop a model of this "make-or-buy" choice that highlights the trade-off between productive efficiency and the costs of contract administration. We construct a dataset...

Using firm-level administrative tax data on the 43% of business liabilities in the United States tied to privately held firms, we document dramatic reductions in leverage since the Great Recession. Leverage for the average private firm fell fifteen percent between 2004 and 2018. In contrast,...

Yes, most likely. The firm-level evidence on costly reversibility is even stronger than the prior evidence at the plant level. The firm-level investment rate distribution is highly skewed to the right, with a small fraction of negative investments, 5.79%, a tiny fraction of inactive investments,...

In 2021, the U.S. Treasury reduced Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) exposure to speculative mortgages. As a result, GSE purchases fell by about 20 percentage points. The policy reduced credit to speculative investors in housing, but increased credit to unaffected parts of the...

We analyze the costs and benefits of intermediaries for government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) mortgages using regulatory data. We find evidence of lenders pricing for observable and unobservable default risk independently from the GSEs. These findings are explained using a model of competitive...

We study the variability of business growth rates in the U.S. private sector from 1976 onwards. To carry out our study, we exploit the recently developed Longitudinal Business Database (LBD), which contains annual observations on employment and payroll for all U.S. businesses. Our central...

This paper uses a firm level multi-industry data set covering 456 Chinese manufacturing sectors to assess the implications of Renminbi (RMB) real exchange rate appreciation for adjustments in employment and wage rates. We stress differences in both industry and firm characteristics within...

Spatial differences in labor market performance are large and highly persistent. Using data from the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, we document striking similarities in spatial differences in unemployment, vacancies, job finding, and job filling within each country. This robust...

This paper argues that rigid wages cannot provide the underpinnings of a universally valid theory of the business cycle, simply because wages are not universally rigid. Several different statistical techniques suggest that wage rates in the U.K. and Japan are between three and 15 times more...

This paper examines gender differences in labor market outcomes for hard-to-employ youth in the US and West Germany during the 1984-91 period. We find that young, less educated American men and especially women are far less likely to be employed than their German counterparts. Moreover, less...