We analyze a large-scale survey of owners, managers, and employees of small businesses in the United States to understand the effects of the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic on those businesses. The survey was fielded in late April 2020 among Facebook business page administrators, frequent...

Using cross-country data, this paper investigates the relationship between workplace representation and strikes. Works councils are associated with reduced strike activity. However, where union members make up a majority of works councillors, such union-dominated councils experience greater...

Expectations about macro-finance variables, such as inflation, vary significantly across genders, even within the same household. We conjecture that traditional gender roles expose women and men to different economic signals in their daily lives, which in turn produce systematic variation in...

This paper uses unique Finnish firm-level micro data on service imports, work-force composition, and firm characteristics to examine changes in employment composition and performance of Finnish service importers during a period of a significant increase in services imports (2002-2012). We use...

Workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage. In particular, low-paid workers underestimate wages elsewhere. We document this anchoring bias by eliciting workers’ beliefs in a representative survey in Germany and comparing them to measures of actual outside...

Firms without paid employees account for up to 80% of all firms, but only a small minority ever hires. This paper investigates the relationship between labour costs and the decision to hire a first employee and become an employer. Leveraging a unique policy in Belgium that permanently reduced...

The paper investigates whether the impact of regulations on entrepreneurship depends on corruption. We first test whether regulations robustly deter firm entry into the markets. Our results show that some regulations are indeed important determinants of entrepreneurial activity. Specifically,...

This paper identifies several distortions which create barriers to entrepreneurship. First, in addition to the innate entry cost, there are entry costs caused by regulation. Second, union wage policies raise the opportunity cost of entrepreneurship. Third, inefficiencies in the transmission of...

Demographic change will be one of the major challenges for economic policy in the developed world in the next decades. In this article, we analyze the relationship between age structure and the number of startups. We argue that an individual's decision to start a business is determined by his or...

Inheritance taxes may induce heirs to discontinue family firms. Because firm dissolution incurs transaction costs, a preferential tax treatment of transferred family businesses seems to be desirable from a macroeconomic viewpoint. The support of dynastic succession, however, entails also a cost...