We introduce a novel method for measuring economic uncertainty at the firm, sector, and aggregate levels using sales volatility and validate it by comparison with existing macroeconomic uncertainty measures. We use Compustat firms data in the period 2000-2022 to construct our uncertainty...

Firms' sensitivities to business cycles differ by size and age. The differences are large: "young and small firms" are more cyclical than large firms, whereas "old and small" firms are closer to acyclical. A heterogeneous-firm model with heterogeneous returns to scale can replicate these...

We study the heterogeneity of family firms using registry data on all private firms in Sweden. We restrict our sample to firms with at least one employee, and we define a family firm as a firm where two or more individuals among the owners or the board of directors are related. We focus on the...

Purpose The financing of growth of the firm is quite sensitive to fluctuations in Fund rates. This requires a treatment of Fund rates being subject to structural shifts. This paper examines the impact of threshold Federal Fund Rate (FFR), being a proxy for Federal Reserve policy, on different...

This paper studies how outsourcing of services activities affects TFP at the firm level. Using the universe of buyer-supplier relationships in Belgium, we first document several new empirical facts about how firms engage in the outsourcing of supporting activities. We show that virtually all...

Hiring new employees is an important part of a new venture's growth. However, we still have limited understanding of the human capital needs of high-growth new ventures, and how their pace of growth relates to whom they hire. We contribute to the literature by investigating 64,404 hires among...

Why do export sales increasingly concentrate among a few "superstars"? This paper is the first to argue that the expansion of the Internet matters for this phenomenon. Using firm-level customs transaction data from 11 developing countries, we show that the spread of the internet steepens the...

Business creation is economically important, and unemployment precedes the creation of a substantial share of new firms. Yet, most research has focused on analyzing the effects of unemployment insurance policies on re-employment outcomes, ignoring self-employment. In this paper, we analyze how...