We estimate the labor market impacts of Brazil's 1993 outsourcing legalization using North-South variation in pre-legalization court permissiveness, and comparing security guards to less-affected occupations. We find that outsourcing legalization persistently reallocated jobs from older...

What is the role of startups within the innovation ecosystem? Since 2000, startups have grown in their share of commercializing research from top U.S. universities; however, prior work has little to say on the particular advantages of startup ventures in the innovation process relative to more...

This study examines "tunneling" practices through which health care providers covertly extract profit by making inflated payments for goods and services to commonly-owned related parties. While incentives to tunnel exist across sectors, health care providers may find it uniquely advantageous to...

Private equity (PE) plays an increasingly important role in the modern US economy. However, its impacts on owned-firms are incompletely understood. We exploit a historically large leveraged buyout of a national hospital chain to examine how the full life cycle of PE influences hospital-level...

Good data on the size and composition of the independent contractor workforce are elusive, with household survey and administrative tax data often disagreeing on levels and trends. We carried out a series of focus groups to learn how self-employed independent contractors speak about their work....

Information technology (IT) can enhance firms' long-run performance but is also a risky investment, with high fixed costs and uncertain returns. Whether market events influence this tradeoff has received limited attention. We leverage the healthcare context to empirically examine hospitals' IT...

This paper tests whether mergers between nursing home chains and independent facilities affect quality of care using facility-level data from 1999-2019. Staggered difference-in-differences estimates suggest that acquired facilities experience a 5% reduction in health deficiency citations 2 years...

We develop and estimate a spatial search-and-bargaining model to study the role of intermediaries and spatial frictions using data from the used-car market. We find that dealers earn price premiums by leveraging three key advantages: selective acquisition of higher-quality cars, superior...

Fake product reviews--and the manipulation of reputation systems by sellers more broadly--are a widespread issue for two-sided platforms. We study two primary channels through which such manipulation can affect market outcomes: (i) creating misinformation about the reviewed product, and (ii)...

We develop a stylized model that allows us to estimate a value-added measure for nursing homes ("SNFs") which accounts for patient selection both into and out of a SNF. We use the model, together with detailed data on the physical and mental health of about 6 million Medicare SNF patients...