We examine firm responses to location-based hiring subsidies. We leverage institutional features of the California Competes Tax Credit (CCTC), a large-scale business incentive program that incorporates best practices from prior job creation policies. The CCTC award selection procedure combines...

We estimate the effect of granting access to driver licenses to undocumented immigrants on their offspring's access to early childhood education (ECE). Using individual-level data from the ACS, we find that granting driving privileges to undocumented immigrants leads to a 6% increase in ECE...

This paper investigates a unique policy designed to maintain employment during the privatization of East German firms after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The policy required new owners of the firms to commit to employment targets, with penalties for non-compliance. Using a dynamic model, we...

We investigate the impact of a set of place-based subsidies introduced in Turkey in 2012. Using firm-level balance-sheet data along with data on the domestic production network, we first assess the policy's direct and indirect impacts. We find an increase in economic activity in...

This paper studies the impact of active labour market programs for institutionally distinct Indigenous populations in Canada using administrative data on the universe of participants in the Aboriginal Skills and Employment Training Strategy (ASETS). Within Indigenous population groups, we...

Was the $278 billion reboot of the $800 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) in early 2021 disbursed equitably to minority communities? This paper provides the first analysis of how PPP funds were disbursed to minority communities in the third and final round of the program, which was...

We study the stock market effects of the arrival of the three rounds of "stimulus checks" to U.S. taxpayers and the single round of direct payments to Hong Kong citizens. The first two rounds of U.S. checks appear to have increased retail buying and share prices of retail-dominated portfolios....

We investigate the implications of extra-normal government spending under the COVID-19 pandemic for commercial bank lending growth between 2019Q4 and 2020Q4 in a large sample of over 3000 banks from 71 countries. We control for pre-pandemic structural factors, bank characteristics and government...

Congress responded to the COVID pandemic's disruptions to instruction with unprecedented federal aid for school districts. While this relief has been widely characterized as a major windfall for K-12 education, per-pupil amounts vary considerably across districts, as will the costs districts...

COVID-19 relief legislation offers a unique setting to study how political representation shapes the distribution of federal assistance to state and local governments. We provide evidence of a substantial small-state bias: an additional Senator or Representative per million residents predicts an...