The recent literature has argued for high concentration of earnings, differences in rates of return on assets and bequests as potential determinants of the high level of wealth concentration in the US. Analyzing the joint distribution of earnings, capital income and net worth, we find evidence...

We examine workers' ability to work from home, as well as their propensity to actually work from home in developing countries. We use worker-level STEP data covering the task content of jobs to measure the ability to work from home. While the ability to WFH is low in developing countries, it...

Poor countries have low rates of wage employment and high rates of self-employment. This paper shows that they also have high rates of unemployment relative to wage employment, and that self-employment is particularly high where the unemployment-wage employment ratio is high. I interpret high...

While most of the literature on employment protection has focused on government-mandated severance pay, it has recently been documented that a substantial share of severance payments derives from private contracts or collective agreements. This paper studies the determination of these payments....

How and why does the firm size distribution differ across countries? Using two datasets covering more than 30 countries, this paper documents that several features of the firm size distribution are strongly associated with income per capita: the entrepreneurship rate and the fraction of small...

"Entrepreneurs out of necessity" identified by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey are a sizeable group across countries. They tend to have low education, run smaller firms, expect their firms to grow less, but are likely to stay in the market. This evidence is a challenge for existing...

We measure the effect of lockdown policies on employment and GDP across countries using individual- and sector-level data. Employment effects depend on the ability to work from home, which ranges from about half of total employment in rich countries to around 35% in poor countries. This gap...