The County Business Patterns data published by the US Census Bureau track employment by county and industry from 1946 to the present. Two features of the data limit their usefulness to researchers: (1) employment for the majority of county-industry cells is suppressed to protect confidentiality,...

Standard models suggest that adverse labor demand shocks will lead to bigger employment losses if institutional factors like minimum wages and trade unions prevent downward wage adjustments. Some economists have argued that this insight explains the contrast between the United States, where real...

In this paper we calculate and analyze the automobile industries cost and productivity experience during the 1970 's in Canada, the U.S.and Japan. Utilizing an econometric cost function methodology, we are able to isolate the major source of short-run disequilibrium in this industry-variations'...

This paper discusses a portion of our work linking data on the agriculture sector in the United States and Canada. The purpose of this work is to explore the evolution of gains in agricultural productivity in the two countries during the post-WWII period. Comparable data has been developed for...

Measures of productivity growth typically include in the Productivity "residual" the impacts of subequilibrium from fixity of factors, costs of adjustment, returns to scale and markups. This paper proposes a general two part framework for adjusting the residual measure to take these impacts into...

This paper examines the historical origins of "Original Sin" or why countries are unable to issue long term debt domestically or borrow abroad in terms of the domestic currency. We conduct an historical case study for a group of countries that had largely overcome the problem of Original Sin by...

In this paper we describe the U.S. Census Bureau's redesign and production implementation of the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) first introduced by Jarmin and Miranda (2002). The LBD is used to create the Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS), tabulations describing the entry, exit,...

We construct representative firm-level longitudinal data for twenty-seven European countries using financial statements from the Orbis global database, providing a “how-to” guide on the construction. We validate our dataset by comparing its aggregate coverage to official statistics and...

This paper investigates the effects of increased cash dividend payout, and of quot;forced realizations~ of capital gains in corporate control transactions, on the level of aggregate consumption. The results support the proposition that investors respond differently to cash receipts from firms...