Search Results
Working Paper
Interest rate expectations and the demand for short-term business credit
Short-term credit plays an essential part in the business financing process. In view of its importance in the nation's credit structure, the market for short-term business credit receives a great deal of attention from financial analysts.
Conference Paper
Business-to-business: challenges and opportunities
Journal Article
The churn among firms
Working Paper
Wage rigidity: a look inside the firm
This paper tests for nominal salary rigidity using panel data from two large service-sector firms. Distributions of the firms' salary changes exhibit nominal rigidity: few nominal pay cuts, a pile-up of observations at zero, and positive skewness and asymmetry. In addition, these characteristics become more pronounced in periods of low inflation. These results are much stronger than those found in the previous literature. Further analysis shows that the sizable measurement error in the PSID and the fact that establishment surveys typically follow average wages within jobs may bias the results ...
Report
Idiosyncratic shocks and the role of nonconvexities in plant and aggregate investment dynamics
We solve equilibrium models of lumpy investment wherein establishments face persistent shocks to common and plant-specific productivity. Nonconvex adjustment costs lead plants to pursue generalized (S, s) rules with respect to capital; thus, their investments are lumpy. In partial equilibrium, this yields substantial skewness and kurtosis in aggregate investment, though, with differences in plant-level productivity, these nonlinearities are far less pronounced. Moreover, nonconvex costs, like quadratic adjustment costs, increase the persistence of aggregate investment, yielding a better match ...
Journal Article
News flash: Small-market papers prosper
In small cities and towns in the district, the demise of newspapers has been greatly exaggerated.
Journal Article
Entrepreneurship and the policy environment
This paper uses a panel approach to examine the effect that the government-policy environment has on the level of entrepreneurship. Specifically, the authors investigate whether marginal income tax rates and bankruptcy exemptions influence rates of entrepreneurship. Whereas previous work in the literature finds that both policies are positively related to entrepreneurship, these results show non-monotonic relationships: a U-shaped relationship between marginal tax rates and entrepreneurship and an S-shaped relationship between bankruptcy exemptions and entrepreneurship.
Working Paper
A structural empirical model of firm growth, learning, and survival
In this paper we develop an empirical model of entrepreneurs' business continuation decisions, and we estimate its parameters using a new panel of monthly alcohol tax returns from bars in the state of Texas. In our data, entrepreneurial failure is frequent and predictable. In the first year of life, 20% of our sample's bars exit, and these tend to be smaller than average. In the model, an entrepreneur bases her business continuation decision on potentially noisy signals of her bar's future profits. The presence of noise implies that she should make her decision based on both current and past ...
Journal Article
A history of emerging domestic markets
The Milken Institute?s Center for Emerging Domestic Markets has been a leader in researching and writing about the issue of expanding investment in traditionally undervalued and undercapitalized entrepreneurs, enterprises and communities, including women and ethnic business owners, urban cores, rural areas and low-income populations. This article traces the evolution of the emerging domestic market concept and provides a guide to the existing literature.