We describe the broad range of uncertainties faced by the developers of medical technologies. Empirically, we estimate the asset market incidence of two realizations of uncertainties we classify as within-market policy risks. The events we analyze concern the intellectual property of Myriad...

This paper investigates the relationship between dividend payouts and corporate investment. We find significant heterogeneity in the relationship across firms — heterogeneity that helps reconcile competing results in the literature. Drawing on financial filing data from Compustat, we first...

Large retailers have significant positive spillovers on nearby businesses, and both private and public mechanisms exist to attract them. We estimate these externalities using detailed geographic establishment data and exogenous variation from national chain bankruptcies. We show that local...

Local governments rely heavily on sales tax revenue. We use national bankruptcies of big-box retail chains to study sudden plausibly exogenous revenue shortfalls. Treated localities respond by reducing spending on law enforcement and administrative services. We further study how cities with...

We assess the Covid-19 pandemic's implications for state government sales and income tax revenues. We estimate that the economic declines implied by recent forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office will lead to a shortfall of roughly $106 billion in states' sales and income tax revenues for...

The variation in a state-level measure of local economic-policy uncertainty during the 2007-2009 recession matches the cross-sectional distribution of unemployment outcomes in this period. This relationship is robust to numerous controls for other determinants of labor market outcomes. Using...

Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences? We address this question by studying the Tea Party movement in the United States, which rose to prominence through coordinated rallies across the country on Tax Day, April 15, 2009. We...

We study the local economic spillovers generated by LeBron James' presence on a team in the National Basketball Association. Mr. James, the first overall pick of the 2003 NBA draft, spent the first seven seasons of his career at the Cleveland Cavaliers, and then moved to the Miami Heat in 2010,...

We assess the Covid-19 pandemic's implications for state government sales and income tax revenues. We estimate that the economic declines implied by recent forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office will lead to a shortfall of roughly $106 billion in states' sales and income tax revenues for...