It is well known that new businesses are typically much smaller than their established industry competitors, and that this size gap closes slowly. We show that even in commodity-like product markets, these patterns do not reflect productivity gaps, but rather differences in demand-side...

Whether and to what extent environmental regulations influence the competitiveness of firms remains a hotly debated issue. Using detailed production data from tens of thousands of U.S. manufacturing plants drawn from Annual Survey of Manufactures, we estimate the effects of environmental...

Many firms own links of production chains- i.e., they own both upstream and downstream plants in vertically linked industries. We use broad-based yet detailed data from the economy’s goods-producing sectors to investigate the reasons for such vertical ownership. It does not appear that...

This paper empirically investigates the possible market power effects of vertical integration proposed in the theoretical literature on vertical foreclosure. It uses a rich data set of cement and ready-mixed concrete plants that spans several decades to perform a detailed case study. There is...

This paper explores rich longitudinal data to gain a better understanding of the importance of spatial mismatch in lower-paid workers’ job search. The data infrastructure at our disposal allows us to investigate the impact on a variety of job search-related outcomes of localized and...

This paper studies capital adjustment at the establishment level. Our goal is to characterize capital adjustment costs, which are important for understanding both the dynamics of aggregate investment and the impact of various policies on capital accumulation. Our estimation strategy searches for...

Using a large data set that links individual Current Population Survey (CPS) records to employer-reported administrative data, we document substantial discrepancies in basic measures of employment status that persist even after controlling for known definitional differences between the two data...

Unemployment inflows fell from 4 percent of employment per month in the early 1980s to 2 percent or less by the mid 1990s and thereafter. U.S. data also show a secular decline in the job destruction rate and the volatility of firm-level employment growth rates. We interpret this decline as a...

Research on effects of living in voucher-assisted and public housing to date has largely focused on short-term outcomes, while data limitations and challenges of identification have been an obstacle to conclusive results. In contrast, this paper assesses effects of children’s housing on their...

Do the job-to-job moves of workers contribute to the cyclicality of employment growth at different types of firms? In this paper, we use linked employer-employee data to provide direct evidence on the role of job-to- job flows in job reallocation in the U.S. economy. To guide our analysis, we...