We estimate the effects of a simplification in the bureaucratic regulation for doing business on firm demographics in Italy, where a 2011 legislation reform required all municipalities to institute a one-stop shop for doing business. We use data for all Italian firms active in private...

Many entrepreneurs work informally because it is costly to start and run a business legally. Using a dynamic model of industry equilibrium, I show that the costs of the legal system can explain the cross country variability of the size of the informal economy. The model implies that the business...

This paper analyzes how entrepreneurs fare in an intermediary market segment when the segment is closely attached to a single supplier market. While focusing on two structural constraints, organizational structure and competitive pressure, I build off of the fact that in the past thirty years in...

Can tax policy foster the creation of new companies? To answer this question, we assemble a novel country-industry level panel database with data on entry (by incorporation) for 17 European countries between 1997 and 2004. Our analysis is based on recent models of how corporate taxation affects...

The amendment to the German Trade and Crafts Code in 2004 offers a natural experiment to asses the causal effects of this reform on the probabilities of being self-employed and transition into and out of self-employment, using cross-sections (2002-2006) of German microcensus data. This study...

Does culture affect the manner in which a society regulates the entry of new firms? Our results suggest it does. We find more individualistic countries regulate entry more lightly. This result is robust to different measures of individualism and to a variety of controls for cultural values and...

Regulations can create economic rents for incumbents at the expense of new entrants, thereby limiting entrepreneurship and exacerbating income inequality. Cross-country studies have shown that higher costs to starting a business tends to slow new firm formation (Chambers and Muenmo 2019) and...

This paper studies the effects of differences in local administrative burdens in Italy in the years preceding a major reform that sped up firm registration procedures. Combining regulatory data from a survey on Italian provinces before the reform (costs and time to start a business) with...