This paper takes a retrospective look at the U.S. government's effort to rescue and restructure General Motors and Chrysler in the midst of the 2009 economic and financial crisis. The paper describes how two of the largest industrial companies in the world came to seek a bailout from the U.S....

What is the optimal form of firm organization during "bad times"? Using two large micro datasets on firm decentralization from US administrative data and 10 OECD countries, we find that firms that delegated more power from the Central Headquarters to local plant managers prior to the Great...

A growing body of research has contributed to understanding the labor market and political effects of globalization. This paper explores an overlooked aspect of trade-induced adjustments in the labor market: the institutional aspect. We take advantage of the two-tier collective bargaining...

During the 1930s and 1940s, collective bargaining emerged as the workplace governance norm in much of the U.S. industrial sector. Following its peak in the 1950s, union density in the U.S. private sector fell steadily, to only 7.4 percent in 2006. Governance shifted from a formalized union norm...

A body of recent empirical work has found strong evidence that the labor elasticity of supply to the firm is finite, implying that firms may have wage setting power. However, these studies capture only snapshots of the parameter. We study this parameter over a period that provides substantial...

In response to COVID-19, dramatic safer-at-home policies were implemented. The understanding of their impacts on social distancing, travel and pollution is in its infancy. We pair a differences-in-differences framework and synthetic control methods with rich cellular tracking and high frequency...

We study the effects of a large car scrappage scheme in Germany on new car purchases and local air quality by combining vehicle registration data with data on local air pollutant emissions. For identification we exploit cross-sectional variation across districts in the number of cars eligible...

Using panel data on immigrant populations from European, Asian and African countries the study estimates positive associations between the number of mobile applications in use aiming to facilitate immigrants' societal integration (m-Integration) and increased level of integration (Ethnosizer),...

When a multi-plant firm must close one unit due to declining demand it can choose between two alternatives. On the one hand, the firm can announce a certain span of time in which the plants are evaluated according to relative performance with the least performing plant being shut down in the end...