We construct a structural model of entry into self-employment to evaluate the impact of policies supporting entrepreneurship. Previous work has recognized that workers may opt for self-employment due to the non-pecuniary benefits of running a business and not necessarily because they are good at...

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,...

This paper provides a model-based empirical strategy to, (i) detect the presence and gauge the magnitude of government subsidies and (ii) quantify their impact on production reallocation across countries, industry prices, costs and consumer surplus. I construct and estimate an industry model...

On October 6. 1979, the Federal Reserve announced what most people interpreted as a change in monetary policy. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the effects of this change on the 1980-81 economy. The effects of the change are estimated from simulations with my model of the U.S. economy...

This paper formulates a back of the envelope approach to study the effects of monetary policy on household consumption expenditures. We analyze several transmission mechanisms operating through direct, partial equilibrium channels--intertemporal substitution and net interest rate exposure--and...

The Internet comprises thousands of independently operated networks, where bilaterally negotiated interconnection agreements determine the flow of data between networks. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes strict restrictions on processing and sharing of...

We quantify the importance of non-monetary news in central bank communication. Using evidence from four major central banks and a comprehensive classification of events, we decompose news conveyed by central banks into news about monetary policy, economic growth, and separately, shocks to risk...

Small retail investors at the Robinhood (RH) retail brokerage firm from 2018 to 2020 shared with Finnish and larger US investors from the 1990s a preference for extreme recent winners and losers. Interestingly, this preference held even for the overall stock market during the March-2020 Covid...

We estimate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on business failures among small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) in seventeen countries using a large representative firm-level database. We use a simple model of firm cost-minimization and measure each firm's liquidity shortfall during and after...

We examine the effectiveness of forward guidance at the effective lower bound (ELB) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Survey evidence underscores the myopia of professional forecasters at the initial stages of the pandemic and the extraordinary dispersion of their recent forecasts....