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Jel Classification:D22 

Working Paper
Entrepreneurship and State Taxation

Entrepreneurship plays a vital role in the economy, yet there exists little well-identified research into the effects of taxes on startup activity. Using recently developed county-level data on startups, we examine the effect of states' corporate, personal and sales tax rates on new firm activity and test for cross-border spillovers in response to these policies. We find that new firm employment is negatively?and disproportionately?affected by corporate tax rates. We find little evidence of an effect of personal and sales taxes on entrepreneurial outcomes. Our results are robust to changes in ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2018-003

Working Paper
Last Resort Insurance: Wildfires and the Regulation of a Crashing Market

An increasing number of people are denied home insurance coverage in the private market and must instead turn to state-sponsored plans known as “Insurers of Last Resort.” This paper examines how insurers of last resort interact with the private market under increasing disaster risks. We first present a simple model of an adversely selected insurance market, highlighting that the insurer of last resort allows strict price regulation to be compatible with full insurance. We then empirically study the California non-renewal moratoriums, a regulation that forced insurers to supply insurance ...
Working Papers , Paper 2510

Working Paper
Political Connections, Allocation of Stimulus Spending, and the Jobs Multiplier

Using American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) data, we show that firms lever their political connections to win stimulus grants and that public expenditure channeled through politically connected firms hinders job creation. We build a unique database that links information on campaign contributions, state legislative elections, firm characteristics, and ARRA grant allocation. Using exogenous variation in political connections based on ex-post close elections held before ARRA, we causally show that politically connected firms are 38 percent more likely to secure a grant. Based on an ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2021-005r1

Working Paper
Because of Monopolies, Income Inequality Significantly Understates Economic Inequality

In social science research, household income is widely used as a stand-in for, or approximation to, the economic well-being of households. In a parallel way, income-inequality has been employed as a stand-in for inequality of economic well-being, or for brevity, "economic-inequality." But there is a force in market economies, ones with extensive amounts of monopoly, like the United States, which leads income-inequality to understate economic-inequality. This force has not been recognized before and derives from how monopolies behave. Monopolies, of course, raise prices. This reduces the ...
Working Papers , Paper 777

Report
Do long-haul truckers undervalue future fuel savings?

The U.S. federal government enacted fuel efficiency standards for medium and heavy trucks for the first time in September 2011. Rationales for using this policy tool typically depend upon frictions existing in the marketplace or consumers being myopic, such that vehicle purchasers undervalue the future fuel savings from increased fuel efficiency. We measure by how much long-haul truck owners undervalue future fuel savings by employing recent advances to the classic hedonic approach to estimate the distribution of willingness-to-pay for fuel efficiency. We find significant heterogeneity in ...
Staff Reports , Paper 756

Report
International shocks and domestic prices: how large are strategic complementarities?

How strong are strategic complementarities in price setting across firms? In this paper, we provide a direct empirical estimate of firms? price responses to changes in prices of their competitors. We develop a general framework and an empirical identification strategy to estimate the elasticities of a firm?s price response both to its own cost shocks and to the price changes of its competitors. Our approach takes advantage of a new micro-level data set for the Belgian manufacturing sector, which contains detailed information on firm domestic prices, marginal costs, and competitor prices. The ...
Staff Reports , Paper 771

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 ...
International Finance Discussion Papers , Paper 1382

Report
Demographic origins of the startup deficit

We propose a simple explanation for the long-run decline in the U.S. startup rate. It originates from a slowdown in labor supply growth since the late 1970s, largely pre-determined by demographics. This channel can explain roughly 60 percent of the decline and why incumbent firm survival and average growth over the lifecycle have changed little. We show these results in a standard model of firm dynamics and test the mechanism using cross-state variation in labor supply growth. Finally, we show that a longer entry rate series imputed using historical establishment tabulations rises over the ...
Staff Reports , Paper 888

Report
A unified approach to measuring u*

This paper bridges the gap between two popular approaches to estimating the natural rate of unemployment, u*. The first approach uses detailed labor market indicators, such as labor market flows, cross-sectional data on unemployment and vacancies, or various measures of demographic changes. The second approach, which employs reduced-form models and DSGE models, relies on aggregate price and wage Phillips curve relationships. We combine the key features of these two approaches to estimate the natural rate of unemployment in the United States using both data on labor market flows and a ...
Staff Reports , Paper 889

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Decker, Ryan A. 6 items

Akcigit, Ufuk 4 items

Alp, Harun 4 items

Diegmann, André 4 items

Schmitz, James A. 4 items

Serrano-Velarde, Nicolas 4 items

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E24 9 items

D24 6 items

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Productivity 5 items

Industrial policy, Privatizations 4 items

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Size-dependent regulations 4 items

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