This paper investigates firms’ responses to threshold-dependent intensity of tax enforcement. We use administrative tax return data over the entire population of German firms and exploit industry variation in firm size thresholds applied by the tax administration. In our setting, each...

Countries that have relatively fewer workers with a secondary education have smaller firms. The shortage of skilled workers limits the growth of more productive firms. Two factors influence the availability of skilled workers: i) the education level of the workforce and ii) large public sectors...

Most of the rise in overall earnings inequality is accounted for by rising between-industry dispersion from about ten percent of 4-digit NAICS industries. These thirty industries are in the tails of the earnings distribution, and are clustered especially in high-paying high-tech and low-paying...

In this paper it is argued that the size distribution of firms may largely be determined by institutional factors. This hypothesis is tested in an exploratory fashion by studying the evolution of the size distribution of firms over time in Sweden for a period spanning from the late 1960s to the...

In recent years, policy debate has increasingly focused on the issues concerning size distribution of firms and employment. It is often claimed that we are approaching a new economic era, where large enterprises have lost their importance in developed economies. This raises the question as how...

We study the relative effect of venture capital and bank finance on large manufacturing firms in local U.S. markets. Theory predicts that with venture capital, the firm size distribution should become more stretched-out to the right, but it’s ambiguous on the effect of banks on large firms....

Small start-up firms are the engine of job creation in early transition and yet little is known about the characteristics of this new sector. We seek to identify patterns of job growth in this sector in terms of niches left from central planning and ask about differences in job creation across...