A growing fraction of companies globally have made commitments to reduce their carbon emissions by a certain date. While the companies that make commitments subsequently reduce their emissions, the effect on overall emissions of companies (including those that do not commit) has been small; the...

Corruption is a widespread phenomenon in many developing and transitional economies. China is a country in profile both in the prevalence of corruption, and in its attempts to root out corruption. The recent anti-corruption campaign in China, which started in December of 2012 when President Xi...

In this paper, we zoom in on the firm level of German merchandise foreign trade, using a novel data base with information on the export and import value by firm, country, product and year for the period 2011-2019. Problems arising from the consolidated reporting of taxable entities and the...

Minimum wages generate an asymmetric pass-through of rm shocks across workers. We establish this result leveraging employer-employee data on Italian metalmanufacturing rms, which face di erent wage oors that vary within occupations. In response to negative rm productivity shocks, workers close...

During the Progressive Era (1900-29), economic growth was rapid but volatile. Boom and busts witnessed the formation and failure of tens of thousands of firms and thousands of banks. This essay uses new data and methods to identify causal links between failures of banks and bankruptcies of...

We model firms' allocation of resources across surplus-creating (i.e., productive) and surplus-appropriating (i.e., rent-seeking) activities. Our model predicts that industry-wide technological advancements, such as recent progress in data collection and processing, induce a disproportionate and...

This paper studies the effects of the minimum wage on the life cycle of firms. We first build a tractable model where heterogeneous firms have labor market power, invest in innovation, and choose formal or informal sectors. The model predicts that a minimum wage hike not only shrinks young and...