One potential consequence of rising concentration of income at the top of the distribution is increased borrowing, as less affluent households attempt to maintain standards of living with less income. This paper explores the “keeping up with the Joneses” phenomenon using data from the Survey...

This paper investigates how layoffs due to import competition affect new and existing businesses at a highly local level. To conduct our analysis, we construct measures of import-related layoffs at the ZIP code level and combine these with ZIP code-level establishment counts. We find that...

This study examines the effect of state minimum wage changes on new and existing business establishments. It employs a refined border approach in conjunction with other differencing methods to control for unobserved heterogeneous area characteristics. The findings suggest that state minimum wage...