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Discussion Paper
Selection in Banking
Over the past thirty years, more than 2,900 U.S. banks have transformed from pure depository institutions into conglomerates involved in a broad range of business activities. What type of banks choose to become conglomerate organizations? In this post, we document that, from 1986 to 2018, such institutions had, on average, a higher return on equity in the three years prior to their decision to expand, as well as a lower level of risk overall. However, this superior pre-expansion performance diminishes over time, and all but disappears by the end of the 1990s.
Working Paper
Sample Selection Models Without Exclusion Restrictions: Parameter Heterogeneity and Partial Identification
This paper studies semiparametric versions of the classical sample selection model (Heckman (1976, 1979)) without exclusion restrictions. We extend the analysis in Honoré and Hu (2020) by allowing for parameter heterogeneity and derive implications of this model. We also consider models that allow for heteroskedasticity and briefly discuss other extensions. The key ideas are illustrated in a simple wage regression for females. We find that the derived implications of a semiparametric version of Heckman's classical sample selection model are consistent with the data for women with no college ...
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, ...
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
Fewer but Better : Sudden Stops, Firm Entry, and Financial Selection
We incorporate endogenous technical change into a real business cycle small open economy framework to study the productivity costs of sudden stops. In this economy, productivity growth is determined by the entry of new firms and the expansion decisions of incumbent firms. New firms are created after the implementation of business ideas, yet the quality of ideas is heterogeneous and good ideas are scarce. Selection of the most promising ideas gives rise to a trade-off between mass (quantity) and composition (quality) in the entrant cohort. Chilean plant-level data from the sudden stop ...
Report
Labor Market Dynamics and Development
We build a dataset of harmonized rotating panel labor force surveys covering 42 countries across a wide range of development and document three new empirical findings on labor market dynamics. First, labor market flows (job-finding rates, employment-exit rates, and job-to-job transition rates) are two to three times higher in the poorest as compared with the richest countries. Second, employment hazards in poorer countries decline more sharply with tenure; much of their high turnover can be attributed to high separation rates among workers with low tenure. Third, wage-tenure profiles are much ...