The paper studies the employment effects of a deposit-refund scheme on labor in a simple search-theoretic model of the labor market. It is shown that if a firm pays a deposit to the government when it fires a worker, to be refunded when it employs the same or another worker, the vacancy rate...

This paper studies corporate performance in the aftermath of the global crisis by examining 6,581 manufacturing firms in 48 developed and developing countries in 2010, identifying factors of resilience as well as vulnerability. Based on a cross-sectional analysis, the results show that...

We assess the aggregate productivity impact of distortions arising from labor regulations in Mexico and how they interact with informality. Using employment surveys and a firm-level economic census, we document a number of novel features about informal firms in Mexico. We then construct and...

We document a large decrease in earnings inequality in Brazil between 1996 and 2012.Using administrative linked employer-employee data, we fit high-dimensional worker and firm fixed effects models to understand the sources of this decrease. Firm effects account for40 percent of the total...

We show that too much meritocracy, modeled as accuracy of performance ranking incontests, can be a bad thing: in contests with homogeneous agents, it reduces output and isPareto inefficient. In contests with sufficiently heterogeneous agents, discouragement andcomplacency effects further reduce...

This paper investigates the role of tax incentives towards debt finance in the buildup of leverage in the nonfinancial corporate (NFC) sector, using a large firm-level dataset. We find that so-called debt bias is a significant driver of leverage, for both small and medium-sized enterprises and...

We examine how bank competition in the run-up to the 2007-2009 crisis affects banks' systemic risk during the crisis. We then investigate whether this effect is influenced by two key bank characteristics: securitization and bank capital. Using a sample of the largest listed banks from 15...

This paper examines the variation in life cycle growth across the universe of Mexican firms. We establish two stylized facts to motivate our analysis: first, we show that firm size matters for development by illustrating a close correlation with state-level per capita incomes. Second, we show...

We study the impact of bank credit on firm productivity. We exploit a matched firm-bankdatabase covering all the credit relationships of Italian corporations, together with a naturalexperiment, to measure idiosyncratic supply-side shocks to credit availability and to estimatea production model...

This paper investigates the impact of taxation on firm survival, using hazard models and a large-scale panel dataset on over 4 million nonfinancial firms from 21 countries over the period 1995-2015. We find ample evidence that a lower level of effective marginal tax rate improves firms' survival...