During the past two decades, there has been a dramatic change in IPO activity around the world. Though vibrant IPO activity, attributed to better institutions and governance, used to be a strength of the U.S., it no longer is. IPO activity in the U.S. has fallen compared to the rest of the world...

This paper examines the implications of tuition and need-based financial aid policies for family income - post-secondary (PS) attendance relationships. We first conduct a parallel empirical analysis of the effects of parental income on PS attendance for recent high school cohorts in both the...

This paper uses the Auerbach-Kotlikoff Dynamic Simulation Model to compare the projected demographic transitions in Canada and the United States. The simulation model determines the perfect foresight transition path of an economy in which individuals live to age 75. The model's preferences are...

Within-industry differences in measured plant-level productivity are large. A large literature has been devoted to explaining the causes and consequences of these differences. In the U.S. Census Bureau's manufacturing data, the Bureau imputes for missing values using methods known to result in...

One of the central questions in macroeconomics for many years has been whether government policy can affect private saving rates, and if so to what extent and through what channels. The question has remained controversial because, as with other macroeconomic questions, experiments to check...

U.S. companies are often criticized for being overly short-term oriented. This paper documents that those criticisms have a long history, going back at least thirty-five years. The paper then considers the implications of sustained short-termism for corporate profits, venture capital investments...

Disability insurance take-up has expanded substantially in the past twenty years in the United States while shrinking in Canada. We empirically assess these trends by measuring the strength of the ‘push' from weak labor markets versus the ‘pull' of more generous benefits. Using an...

We provide evidence on the value of patents to startups by leveraging the quasi-random assignment of applications to examiners with different propensities to grant patents. Using unique data on all first-time applications filed at the U.S. Patent Office since 2001, we find that startups that win...

We compare patterns of unemployment and joblessness between Canada and the U.S. during the Great Recession. Similar to previous findings for the U.S. in Kroft et al. [2016], we document a rise in long-term unemployment in Canada. This increase is not accounted for by changes in the observable...

This paper reports on the construction of a new dataset that combines data on trademark applications and registrations from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office with data on firms from the U.S. Census Bureau. The resulting dataset allows tracking of various activity related to trademark use and...