The generosity of Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits was expanded during the pandemic (FPUC), along with the groups of workers eligible for benefits (PUA). These two programs were set to expire in September 2021, but 18 states opted out of both in June 2021. Using Current Population Survey...

Enacted March 27, 2020, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was the most ambitious and creative fiscal policy response to the Pandemic Recession in the United States. PPP offers forgivable loans -- essentially grants -- to businesses with 500 or fewer employees that meet certain requirements....

Does government debt affect interest rates? Despite a substantial body of empirical analysis, the answer based on the past two decades of research is mixed. While many studies suggest, at most, a single-digit rise in the interest rate when government debt increases by one percent of GDP, others...

Both managerial ownership and performance are endogenously determined by exogenous (and only partly observed) changes in the firm's contracting environment. We extend the cross-sectional results of Demsetz and Lehn (1985) and use panel data to show that managerial ownership is explained by key...

It is well recognized by economists that long-term contracting under an array of price and non-price provisions may be an efficient response to small-numbers bargaining problems. Empirical work to distinguish such issues from predictions of models of market power and bargaining has been sparse,...

Could policy changes boost economic growth enough and at a low enough cost to meaningfully reduce federal budget deficits? We assess seven areas of economic policy: immigration of high-skilled workers, housing regulation, safety net programs, regulation of electricity transmission, government...