This article explores the question of whether unionization influences the decision of a firm to merge with another firm. The authors combine merger data, taken from COMPUSTAT, with firm-specific union data obtained from several sources. An econometric matching model allows them to isolate the...

Government fiscal aggregates are often manipulated over the course of the business cycle in order to provide counter-cyclical stimulus. Changes that are not discretionary--the so-called "built-in stabilizers"--also significantly vary over the business cycle, in a manner that is even more...

The authors consider the impact of tax policy uncertainty on firm level and aggregate investment, comparing investment behavior when uncertainty is due to a shock following geometric Brownian motion (GBM) versus when random discrete jumps in tax policy occur. Expectations of the likelihood of a...

Recent research on business investment decisions suggests that real investment in plant and equipment is quite sensitive to changes in the user cost of capital, pointing to the possibility that long-run changes in tax policy may have a significant impact on an economy's capital stock. Indeed,...