Social distancing restrictions and health- and economic-driven demand shifts from COVID-19 are expected to shutter many small businesses and entrepreneurial ventures, but there is very little early evidence on impacts. This paper provides the first analysis of impacts of the pandemic on the...

We estimate by means of indirect inference a structural economic model where firms’ exit and investment decisions are the solution to a discrete-continuous dynamic programming problem. In the model the exit probability depends on the current capital stock and a measure of short-run...

Can culture explain persistent differences in economic activity among individuals and across regions? A novel measure of cultural origin enables us to contrast the entrepreneurial activity of individuals located in the same municipality but whose ancestors lived just on opposite sides of the...

This paper shows that the effects of employment protection critically depend on its enforcement. For this purpose, we capture evasion of employment protection via market exit in a setting of monopolistic competition. We find that the number of firms entering the market depends on firing costs...

This paper develops a theory of firm selection and growth and embeds it into an international trade framework of balanced growth. I assume that firm-level growth is the result of idiosyncratic productivity improvements while there is continuous arrival of new potential producers. Firms can also...

The paper investigates dynamic linkages between entry and exit rates in Brazilian manufacturing in the context of 231 (4-digits) industries during the 1996-2005 period. The empirical analysis focuses on the estimation of a dynamic panel data for entry and exit rates and controls for the business...

What do small firms do when given an income tax cut? We address this question by examining the consequences of a sharp reduction in the corporate income tax rate for small- and micro-profit enterprises (SMPE) in China based on confidential tax returns. Utilizing the gradual increases in the...

In many countries entrepreneurship is promoted through tax reductions for small businesses and by various government support schemes. We analyze the effects of such policies to subsidize small businesses in a setting where both the risk-return characteristics of the selected innovation project...

The paper investigates the survival of newly created small and medium enterprises in Brazilian manufacturing taking as reference the 1996-2005 period. The econometric analysis relies on time-varying version of the proportional hazard rate model that controls for unobserved heterogeneity. The...