We use a French firm-level panel data set over the period 1993-2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms' R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) the share of R&D investment over total investment is countercyclical...

We study how strongly individuals respond to tax simplicity and how they learn about the complexities of the tax system. We use new French tax returns data on the self-employed from 1994 to 2012. France has three fiscal regimes for the self-employed, which differ in their monetary tax incentives...

In this paper, we identify two counteracting effects of credit access on productivity growth: on the one hand, better access to credit makes it easier for entrepreneurs to innovate; on the other hand, better credit access allows less efficient incumbent firms to remain longer on the market,...

Statistical agencies typically impute inflation for disappearing products based on surviving products, which may result in overstated inflation and understated growth. Using U.S. Census data, we apply two ways of assessing the magnitude of “missing growth” for private nonfarm businesses from...

Growth has fallen in the U.S., while firm concentration and profits have risen. Meanwhile, labor's share of national income is down, mostly due to the rising market share of low labor share firms. We propose a theory for these trends in which the driving force is falling firm-level costs of...

In this paper we use cross-state panel data to show that top income inequality is (at least partly) driven by innovation. We first establish a positive and significant correlation between various measures of innovativeness and top income inequality in cross-state panel regressions. Two distinct...

This paper investigates the effect of export shocks on innovation. On the one hand a positive shock increases market size and therefore innovation incentives for all firms. On the other hand it increases competition as more firms enter the export market. This in turn reduces profits and...

Statistical agencies typically impute inflation for disappearing products based on surviving products, which may result in overstated inflation and understated growth. This paper uses the theory and methodology developed by Aghion et al. (2017) to quantify in the case of France how much of...

Does regulation affect the pace and nature of innovation and if so, by how much? We build a tractable and quantifiable endogenous growth model with size-contingent regulations. We apply this to population administrative firm panel data from France, where many labour regulations apply to firms...

We decompose the “China shock” into two components that induce different adjustments for firms exposed to Chinese exports: an output shock affecting firms selling goods that compete with similar imported Chinese goods, and an input supply shock affecting firms using inputs similar to the...