We empirically identify politically-motivated redistricting and its consequences, studying the effects of changed electorate composition on US congressional district boundaries and on political outcomes. We exploit the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which legalized millions of...

We examine immigrant entrepreneurship and the survival and growth of immigrant-founded businesses over time relative to native-founded companies. Our work quantifies immigrant contributions to new firm creation in a wide variety of fields and using multiple definitions. While significant...

Job creation is one of the most important aspects of entrepreneurship, but we know relatively little about the hiring patterns and decisions of startups. Longitudinal data from the Integrated Longitudinal Business Database (iLBD), Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS), and the Growing America through...

The "Great Recession" resulted in many business closings and foreclosures, but what effect did it have on business formation? On the one hand, recessions decrease potential business income and wealth, but on the other hand they restrict opportunities in the wage/salary sector leaving the net...

Theories of market failures and targeting motivate the promotion of entrepreneurship training programs and generate testable predictions regarding heterogeneous treatment effects from such programs. Using a large randomized evaluation in the United States, we find no strong or lasting effects on...

Prior literature on the economic impact of immigration has largely ignored changes to the composition of labor demand. In contrast, this paper uses a comprehensive collection of survey and administrative data to show that heterogeneous establishment entry and exit drive immigrant-induced job...

This paper analyses the welfare effects of a change from centralized to decentralized political authority. The potential disadvantage with decentralization in our model is that local dominant groups with rather extreme preferences may win the vote and implement policies that harm the well-being...

I use new data on central and general governments for 23 OECD countries over the period 1960-2015 (unbalanced panel) to examine fiscal performance under minority governments. The results do not suggest that minority governments had higher fiscal deficits and public expenditure than majority...

Discrimination against minorities is pervasive in many societies, but little is known about minorities' strategies to avoid being discriminated against. In our trust game among 758 high-school students in the country of Georgia, ethnic Georgian trustors discriminate against the ethnic Armenian...

We study the long-term economic legacy of highly-skilled minorities a century after their wholesale expulsion. Using mass expulsions of Armenian and Greek communities of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century as a unique natural experiment of history, we show that districts with greater...