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Jel Classification:D22 

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 public expenditure channeled through politically connected firms hinders job creation. We build a unique database that links campaign contributions and state legislative election outcomes to 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 64 percent more likely to secure a grant. Based on an instrumental variable approach, we ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2021-005

Report
How Did the MSLP Borrowers Fare Before and During COVID-19?

This policy brief uses Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) data to assess whether the Main Street Lending Program (MSLP) borrowers were in worse financial health than their peers before COVID-19 hit the economy hard in March 2020 or suffered worse deterioration afterward. The findings can help us better understand why these firms sought to obtain MSLP loans. We find that MSLP borrowers tend to be larger than their peer firms (that is, firms in the same industry and state). Within the same size group, MSLP borrowers are on average younger than their peers. Borrowers tended to have a slightly higher ...
Current Policy Perspectives

Working Paper
Asymmetric firm dynamics under rational inattention

We study the link between business failures, markups and business cycle asymmetry in the U.S. economy with a model of optimal firm exit under rational inattention. We show that the model's predictions of lagged, counter-cyclical and positively skewed markups together with counter-cyclical exit rates are consistent with the empirical evidence. Moreover, our model uncovers a new mechanism that links information processing with the business cycle. It predicts counter-cyclical attention to economic conditions consistent with survey evidence.
Working Papers , Paper 1411

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
Monopolies: Silent Spreaders of Poverty and Economic Inequality

The Covid-19 crisis has exposed the vast inequalities that exist within the US economy. As the virus has spread silently, it has laid bare other crises that face our nation---especially the economic vulnerabilities of the country's poor and marginalized. Many of these vulnerabilities can, in fact, be traced back to a single cause that itself has spread silently, but over the last several decades, not months: Monopolies. That monopolies are "silent spreaders of poverty and economic inequality" was well known to economic and legal scholars of the 1930s and 1940s. Wendell Berge, who was ...
Working Papers , Paper 772

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

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
Nonlinear Firm Dynamics

This paper presents empirical evidence on the nature of idiosyncratic shocks to firms and discusses its role for firm behavior and aggregate fluctuations. We document that firm-level sales and productivity are hit by heavy-tailed shocks and follow a nonlinear stochastic process, thus departing from the canonical linear. We estimate a state-of-the-art model to flexibly capture the rich dynamics uncovered in the data and characterize the drivers of nonlinear persistence and non-Gaussian shocks. We show that these features are crucial to get empirically plausible volatility and persistence of ...
Staff Reports , Paper 1088

Working Paper
Pay, Employment, and Dynamics of Young Firms

Why do young firms pay less? Using confidential microdata from the US Census Bureau, we find lower earnings among workers at young firms. However, we argue that such measurement is likely subject to worker and firm selection. Exploiting the two-sided panel nature of the data to control for relevant dimensions of worker and firm heterogeneity, we uncover a positive and significant young-firm pay premium. Furthermore, we show that worker selection at firm birth is related to future firm dynamics, including survival and growth. We tie our empirical findings to a simple model of pay, employment, ...
Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers , Paper 21

Working Paper
The Economic Effects of Trade Policy Uncertainty

We study the effects of unexpected changes in trade policy uncertainty (TPU) on the U.S. economy. We construct three measures of TPU based on newspaper coverage, firms' earnings conference calls, and aggregate data on tari rates. We document that increases in TPU reduce investment and activity using both firm-level and aggregate macroeconomic data. We interpret the empirical results through the lens of a two-country general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities and firms' export participation decisions. In the model as in the data, news and increased uncertainty about higher future ...
International Finance Discussion Papers , Paper 1256

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Decker, Ryan A. 6 items

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