Theory predicts that mandated employment protections may reduce productivity by distorting production choices. Firms facing (non-Coasean) worker dismissal costs will curtail hiring below efficient levels and retain unproductive workers, both of which should affect productivity. These theoretical...

Research on effects of living in voucher-assisted and public housing to date has largely focused on short-term outcomes and 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...

The growth and dominance of large, national chains is a ubiquitous feature of the US retail sector. The recent literature has documented the rise of these chains and the contribution of this structural change to productivity growth in the retail trade sector. Recent studies have also shown that...

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...

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...

Private equity critics claim that leveraged buyouts bring huge job losses. To investigate this claim, we construct and analyze a new dataset that covers U.S. private equity transactions from 1980 to 2005. We track 3,200 target firms and their 150,000 establishments before and after acquisition,...

We use administrative data linking workers and firms to study employer-to-employer flows. After discussing how to identify such flows in quarterly data, we investigate their basic empirical patterns. We find that the pace of employer-to-employer flows is high, representing about 4 percent of...

This paper presents a new approach to the measurement of the effects of spatial mismatch that takes advantage of matched employer-employee administrative data integrated with a person-specific job accessibility measure, as well as demographic and neighborhood characteristics. The basic...

This paper makes use of a newly constructed Census Bureau dataset that follows the universe of sole proprietors, employers and non-employers, over 10 years and links their transitions to their activity as employees earning wage and salary income. By combining administrative data on sole...

There remains considerable debate in the theoretical and empirical literature about the differences in the cyclical dynamics of firms by firm size. This paper contributes to the debate in two ways. First, the key distinction between firm size and firm age is introduced. The evidence presented in...