The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) provided small businesses with roughly $800 billion dollars in uncollateralized, low-interest loans during the pandemic, almost all of which will be forgiven. With 93 percent of small businesses ultimately receiving one or more loans, the PPP nearly...

We construct a structural model of entry into self-employment to evaluate the impact of policies supporting entrepreneurship. Previous work has recognized that workers may opt for self-employment due to the non-pecuniary benefits of running a business and not necessarily because they are good at...

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of financial intermediation and the economic effects of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a large and novel small business support program that was part of the initial policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. We use loan-level...

Social distancing restrictions and health- and economic-driven demand shifts from COVID-19 shut down many small businesses with especially negative impacts on minority owners. Is there evidence that the unprecedented federal government response to help small businesses - the $659 billion...

We study the impacts of a rural development program designed to boost the income of the smallfarm sector in Nicaragua. Exploiting the random assignment of treatment, we find statistically and economically significant impacts on gross farm income and investment in productive farm capital. Using...

Conventional wisdom suggests that small businesses are innovative engines of Schumpetarian growth. However, as small businesses, they are likely to face credit rationing in financial markets. If true then policies that promote lending to small businesses may yield substantial economy-wide...

An ongoing debate in employment policy is whether promoting small and medium enterprises creates more employment. Do small enterprises generate more employment growth than larger firms? We use the elimination of small-scale industry (SSI) promotion in India to address this question. For 60...

We study the impact of AI on labor markets, using establishment level data on vacancies with detailed occupational information comprising the near-universe of online vacancies in the US from 2010 onwards. We classify establishments as "AI exposed" when their workers engage in tasks that are...

This paper examines the regional distribution of public employment in Italy. It documents two sets of facts. This first is the use of public employment as a subsidy from the North to the less wealthy South. We calculate that about half of the wage bill in the South of Italy can be identified as...

In this paper we disentangle the sources of public sector inefficiency using 1982-1995 panel data on manufacturing firms in Indonesia. We consider two leading hypotheses: (1) public sector enterprises are inefficient due to monitoring problems and (2) public sector enterprises are inefficient...