The canonical model of Allingham and Sandmo (1972) predicts that firms evade taxes by optimally trading off between the costs and benefits of evasion. However, there is no direct evidence that firms react to audits in this way. We conducted a large-scale field experiment in collaboration with...

This paper empirically examines firm owners' gender difference in labor demand. We estimate the average treatment effect (ATE) of female ownership on employment of the firm using the 2007 Survey of Business Owners (SBO) Public Use Micro Sample (PUMS), provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. Because...

Drawing on principal-agent perspectives on corporate governance, this paper examines whether employees' hourly pay is linked to ownership dispersion. Using linked workplace-worker data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2011, we find average hourly pay is higher in...

Business support policies designed to raise productivity and employment are commonworldwide, but rigorous micro-econometric evaluation of their causal effects is rare. Weexploit multiple changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a major program to supportmanufacturing jobs...

This paper analyses the impact of government grants on labour demand using plant leveldata for manufacturing industry in Ireland. Our data consists of a large sample of plants andtheir complete grant history...

This paper identifies several distortions which create barriers to entrepreneurship. First, inaddition to the innate entry cost, there are entry costs caused by regulation. Second, unionwage policies raise the opportunity cost of entrepreneurship...<BR>

Firms without paid employees account for up to 80% of all firms, but only a small minority ever hires. This paper investigates the relationship between labour costs and the decision to hire a first employee and become an employer. Leveraging a unique policy in Belgium that permanently reduced...

There is a growing body of evidence on the efficacy of Short-Time Compensation (STC), a subsidy to promote worksharing in a recession, in achieving its intended goal of curtailing layoffs and preventing a sharp rise in unemployment. However, very little is known about the consequences of STC for...

To finance unemployment insurance, states raise payroll tax rates on employers who engage in layoffs. Tax rates are, therefore, highest for firms after downturns, potentially hampering labor-market recovery. Using full-population, administrative records from Florida, I estimate the effect of...

This paper investigates the effects of non-repayable enterprise grants financed from the European Union's Structural and Cohesion Funds on firm outcomes in Hungary using firm- and worker-level information on all rejected and successful grant applications between 2004-2014. In our model, after...