We use a new database, the National Establishment Time Series (NETS), to revisit the debate about the role of small businesses in job creation. Birch (e.g., 1987) argued that small firms are the most important source of job creation in the U.S. economy. But Davis et al. (1996a) argued that this...

Very little is known about the effectiveness of SME policies, and a careful look at the structure, mechanisms and incentives provided by these policies suggest caution in their implementation and, most importantly, the need to carefully and closely monitor their results. This paper relies on the...

We analyze linked databases on all Small Business Administration (SBA) loans, on all SBA lenders, and on all U.S. employers to estimate the effects of financial access on employment growth. Our methods combine regressions with matching on firm age, size, industry, year, and employment history,...

School accountability systems that establish the adoption of incentives for teachers and school managers usually impact positively students’ performance. However, in many circumstances, school accountability systems may face institutional restrictions to establish rewards and sanctions to...

Although formal education is often considered an indicator of political leaders' quality, the evidence on the effectiveness of educated leaders is mixed. Besides, minimum education qualifications are increasingly being used as requirements for contesting elections, making it critical to...

Start-up subsidies for the unemployed have long been an important active labor market policy strategy in Germany. The current subsidy program underwent a major reform in 2011 that changed its key parameters: support was lowered, eligibility criteria were tightened and entitlement was abandoned...

Based on official records from the former East German Ministry for State Security, we quantify the long-term costs of state surveillance on social capital and economic performance. Using county-level variation in the spy density in the 1980s, we exploit discontinuities at state borders to show...

Using a unique dataset of German members of parliament with information on total earnings including outside income, this paper analyzes the politicians' wage gap (PWG). After controlling for observable characteristics as well as accounting for selection into politics, we find a positive PWG...

If people come to live in a country different from their nation state, due to border shifts, expulsion, or migration, they adopt some of the new country's habits after some time. This paper investigates their (return) migration decision when they have been restricted to live in the foreign...

Based on the ideas developed in the literature on the evaluation of active labor market policy, this paper provides a framework for the evaluation of key elements of immigration policy. To this end, the fundamental ingredients of evaluating policy interventions are explained and the specific...