Assessing the state of American entrepreneurship requires not simply counting the quantity but also the initial quality of new ventures. Combining comprehensive business registries and predictive analytics, we present estimates of entrepreneurial quantity and quality from 1988-2014. Rather than...

National policies take varied approaches to encouraging university-based innovation. This paper studies a natural experiment: the end of the “professor's privilege” in Norway, where university researchers previously enjoyed full rights to their innovations. Upon the reform, Norway moved...

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 study a large-scale French reform that provided generous downside insurance for unemployed individuals starting a business. We study whether this reform affects the composition of people who are drawn into entrepreneurship. New firms started in response to the reform are, on average, smaller,...

Assessing the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is essential for policymakers, but challenging because the crisis has unfolded with extreme speed. We identify three indicators – stock market volatility, newspaper-based economic uncertainty, and subjective uncertainty in business...

This paper addresses the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by providing timely and accurate information on the impact of the current pandemic on income and poverty to inform the targeting of resources to those most affected and assess the success of current efforts. We construct new...

We estimate the impact of mask mandates and other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) on COVID-19 case growth in Canada, including regulations on businesses and gatherings, school closures, travel and self-isolation, and long-term care homes. We partially account for behavioral responses...

This paper develops a threshold-augmented dynamic multi-country model (TGVAR) to quantify the macroeconomic effects of Covid-19. We show that there exist threshold effects in the relationship between output growth and excess global volatility at individual country levels in a significant...

In the early phases of the COVID-19 epidemic labor markets exhibited considerable churn, which we relate to three primary findings. First, reopening policies generated asymmetrically large increases in reemployment of those out of work, compared to modest decreases in job loss among those...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a “second pandemic” of anxiety and depression. While vaccines are primarily aimed at reducing COVID-19 transmission and mortality risks, they may have important secondary benefits. We use data from U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey merged to...