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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
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
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
Income Inequality and Job Creation

We propose a novel channel through which rising income inequality affects job creation and macroeconomic outcomes. High-income households save relatively more in stocks and bonds but less in bank deposits. A rising top income share thereby increases the relative financing cost for bank-dependent firms, which in turn create fewer jobs. Exploiting variation in top income shares across US states and an instrumental variable strategy, we provide evidence for this channel. We then build a general equilibrium macro model with heterogeneous households and heterogeneous firms and calibrate it to our ...
Staff Reports , Paper 1021

Working Paper
Changing Business Dynamism and Productivity : Shocks vs. Responsiveness

The pace of job reallocation has declined in all U.S. sectors since 2000. In standard models, aggregate job reallocation depends on (a) the dispersion of idiosyncratic productivity shocks faced by businesses and (b) the marginal responsiveness of businesses to those shocks. Using several novel empirical facts from business microdata, we infer that the pervasive post-2000 decline in reallocation reflects weaker responsiveness in a manner consistent with rising adjustment frictions and not lower dispersion of shocks. The within-industry dispersion of TFP and output per worker has risen, while ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2018-007

Working Paper
COVID-19 Is a Persistent Reallocation Shock

Drawing on data from the firm-level Survey of Business Uncertainty, we present three pieces of evidence that COVID-19 is a persistent reallocation shock. First, rates of excess job and sales reallocation over 24-month periods have risen sharply since the pandemic struck, especially for sales. We compute these rates by aggregating over monthly firm-level observations that look back 12 months and ahead 12 months. Second, as of December 2020, firm-level forecasts of sales revenue growth over the next year imply a continuation of recent changes, not a reversal. Third, COVID-19 shifted relative ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2021-3

Working Paper
Downskilling: changes in employer skill requirements over the business cycle

Using a novel database of 82.5 million online job postings, we show that employer skill requirements fell as the labor market improved from 2010 to 2014. We find that a 1 percentage point reduction in the local unemployment rate is associated with a roughly 0.27 percentage point reduction in the fraction of jobs requiring at least a bachelor?s degree and a roughly 0.23 percentage point reduction in the fraction requiring five or more years of experience. This pattern is established using multiple measures of labor availability, is bolstered by similar trends along heretofore unmeasured ...
Working Papers , Paper 16-9

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

Working Paper
Business Dynamics in the National Establishment Time Series (NETS)/Leland Crane, Ryan Decker

Business microdata have proven useful in a number of fields, but the main sources of comprehensive microdata are subject to significant confidentiality restrictions. A growing number of papers instead use a private data source seeking to cover the universe of U.S. business establishments, the National Establishment Time Series (NETS). Previous research documents the representativeness of NETS in terms of the distribution of employment and establishment counts across industry, geography, and establishment size. But there exists considerable need among researchers for microdata suitable for ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2019-034

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Decker, Ryan A. 6 items

Akcigit, Ufuk 4 items

Alp, Harun 4 items

Diegmann, AndrĂ© 4 items

Schmitz, James A. 4 items

Serrano-Velarde, Nicolas 4 items

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