Whether or not small businesses offer health insurance to their employees is a critical factor in the health care coverage of many Americans, yet many entrepreneurs and decision makers fear that the cost of offering health care coverage to their employees will diminish the growth and survival of...

The availability of international trade transactions data capturing individual relationships between buyers and suppliers permits the answering of numerous new questions governing the economic activity of traders. In this paper, we explore the reliability of two-sided firm trade transactions...

A number of previous studies have demonstrated the impact of community characteristics on environmental outcomes such as local pollution levels and the siting of noxious facilities. If certain groups are indeed exposed to higher levels of air pollution, it may be due to a greater concentration...

This paper examines the evolution of productivity in U.S. manufacturing plants from 1963 to 1992. We define a “vintage effect” as the change in productivity of recent cohorts of new plants relative to earlier cohorts of new plants, and a “survival effect” as the change in productivity of...

Using internal and public use March Current Population Survey (CPS) data, we analyze trends in US income inequality (1975–2004). We find that the upward trend in income inequality prior to 1993 significantly slowed thereafter once we control for top coding in the public use data and censoring...

This paper investigates whether a popular IO technology assumption, the commodity technology model, is appropriate for specific United States manufacturing industries, using data on product composition and use of intermediates by individual plants from the Census Longitudinal Research Database....

The information systems (IS) "productivity paradox" is based on those studies that found little or no positive relationship between firm productivity and spending on IS. However, some earlier studies and one more recent study have found a positive relationship. Given the large amounts spent by...

This paper is a theoretical and empirical investigation of the connection between science, R&D, and the growth of capital. Studies of high technology industries and recent labor studies agree in assigning a large role to science and technology in the growth of human and physical capital,...

Part of the uniqueness of the immigrant Asian business community in the U.S. lies in the fact that many among the highly educated pursue self-employment in small-scale, low-yielding retail and personal service fields. This study analyzes owner departure for a nationwide sample of small...

This paper provides new evidence that estimates based on aggregate data will understate the true procyclicality of total factor productivity. I examine plant-level data and show that some industries experience countercyclical reallocations of output shares among firms at different points in the...