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Working Paper
Getting Schooled: The Role of Universities in Attracting Immigrant Entrepreneurs
We study immigrant founders of venture-capital backed firms using a new and detailed data set that we assemble on the backgrounds of founders. Immigrant founders have been critical to the entrepreneurial ecosystem, accounting for roughly 20% of all venture capital-backed founders over the past 30 years. We document the channels through which immigrant founders arrive in the United States and how those channels have changed over time. Higher education has served as the primary entry channel for immigrant founders. The share of foreign-educated immigrant founders who initially arrive for work ...
Report
Working Remotely? Selection, Treatment, and the Market for Remote Work
How does remote work affect productivity and how productive are workers who choose remote jobs? We estimate both effects in a U.S. Fortune 500 firm’s call centers that employed both remote and on-site workers in the same jobs. Prior to COVID-19, remote workers answered 12 percent fewer calls per hour than on-site workers. When the call centers closed due to COVID-19, the productivity of formerly on-site workers declined by 4 percent relative to already-remote workers, indicating that a third of the initial gap was due to a negative treatment effect of remote work. Yet an 8 percent ...
Working Paper
Measuring Trends in Work From Home: Evidence from Six U.S. Datasets
This paper documents the prevalence of work from home (WFH) in six U.S. data sets. These surveys measure WFH using different questions, reference periods, samples, and survey collection methods. Once we construct samples and WFH measures that are comparable across surveys, all surveys broadly agree about the trajectory of aggregate WFH since the Covid-19 outbreak. The most important source of disagreement in the level of WFH across surveys is in WFH by self-employed workers; by contrast, surveys closely agree on rates of WFH among employees. All surveys agree that in 2024 WFH remains ...
Working Paper
Heterogeneity in Work From Home: Evidence from Six U.S. Datasets
This paper documents heterogeneity in work from home (WFH) across six U.S. data sets. These surveys agree that pre-pandemic differences in WFH rates by sex, education, and state of residence expanded following the Covid-19 outbreak. The surveys also show similar post-pandemic trends in WFH by firm size and industry. We show that an industry's WFH potential was highly correlated with actual WFH during the first year or two of the Covid-19 pandemic, but that this correlation was much weaker before and after the pandemic, suggesting that WFH potential is a necessary but not sufficient ...
Report
Mapping a Sector’s Scope Transformation and the Value of Following the Evolving Core
A surprisingly neglected facet of sector evolution is the evolutionary analysis of firms’, and thus a sector’s, scope. Defining a sector as a group of firms that can change their scope over time, we study the transformation of U.S. banking firms. We undertake a sectoral, population-wide study of business-scope transformation, with particular focus on which segments banks expand into. As financial intermediation evolved, a continuously shifting set of activities became associated with “core banking,” with scope changing and relatedness itself (measured through coincidence) evolving ...
Journal Article
Decentralized Finance (DeFi): Transformative Potential and Associated Risks
Financial services in the crypto finance world are provided by a combination of centralized finance (CeFi) organizations and decentralized finance (DeFi). CeFi's are roughly similar to traditional financial intermediaries, but DeFi seeks to provide services using smart contracts (computer code) rather than an intermediary. DeFi's unusual structure creates some interesting potential but also raises new risks in addition to those already inherent in blockchains and crypto finance. This paper reviews some of the opportunities and risks.
Working Paper
Banks in Space
We study the spatial expansion of banks in response to the banking deregulation of the 1980s and 90s in order to develop a spatial theory of banking. During this period, large banks expanded rapidly, mostly by adding new branches in new locations, while many small banks exited. We document that large banks sorted into the densest markets, but that sorting weakened over time as large banks expanded to more marginal markets in search of locations with a relative abundance of retail deposits. This allowed large banks to reduce their dependence on expensive wholesale funding and grow further. To ...