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Working Paper
Committing to Grow: Privatizations and Firm Dynamics in East Germany
This paper investigates a unique policy designed to maintain employment during the privatization of East German firms after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The policy required new owners of the firms to commit to employment targets, with penalties for non-compliance. Using a dynamic model, we highlight three channels through which employment targets impact firms: distorted employment decisions, increased productivity, and higher exit rates. Our empirical analysis, using a novel dataset and instrumental variable approach, confirms these findings. We estimate a 22% points higher annual employment ...
Discussion Paper
Second-Round Effects of Oil Prices on Inflation in the Advanced Foreign Economies
The surge in oil prices in the wake of the post-COVID-19 economic rebound and Russia's invasion of Ukraine exerted significant upward pressure on consumer price inflation around the world. As seen in the left panel of Figure 1, Brent crude oil prices soared to nearly $130 a barrel in March 2022 and remained elevated through June, before only slowly retracing the gains.
Report
Transformative and Subsistence Entrepreneurs: Origins and Impacts on Economic Growth
This paper studies how individuals sort into entrepreneurship and invention-related occupations and how their interactions shape innovation and economic growth. We develop an endogenous growth model in which occupational sorting jointly determines the supply of R&D talent and entrepreneurs’ demand for it. Empirically, using Danish microdata, we show that transformative entrepreneurs—those who hire R&D workers—tend to have higher IQ and education and build faster-growing firms than other entrepreneurs. Quantitatively, the estimated model indicates that financial barriers to education ...