Entrepreneurial activity is often regarded as an engine for economic growth and job creation. Through tax policy, governments possess a potential lever to influence the decisions of economic agents to start and close small businesses. In Germany, the top marginal income tax rates were reduced...

This paper analyses the impact of government grants on labour demand using plant leveldata for manufacturing industry in Ireland. Our data consists of a large sample of plants andtheir complete grant history...

We estimate the employment effects of a large program of public investment subsidies that ranked applications on a score reflecting both objective criteria and local politicians' preferences. Leveraging the rationing of funds as an ideal RDD, we characterize the heterogeneity of treatment...

China is perceived to rely on subsidizing firms in targeted industries to improve their performance and stay competitive. We implement an approach that allows for the joint estimation of direct and indirect effects of subsidies on subsidized and non-subsidized firms. We find that firms that...

Previous estimates indicate that COVID-19 led to a large drop in the number of operating businesses operating early in the pandemic, but surprisingly little is known on whether these shutdowns turned into permanent closures and whether small businesses were disproportionately hit. This paper...

This paper estimates the direct effects of investment tax credits on firms' production behavior and the additional indirect effects arising from agglomeration economies. Exploiting a change in tax credit rates by firm size in Germany, I find that manufacturing firms increase capital and...

This paper investigates the effect of awarding a second investment grant to the same firm. We implement a Regression Discontinuity Design strategy using a very rich firm-level administrative database, which allows us to link applications to grants and their scores to firms' performance. Overall,...

Portugal introduced a sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB) tax in 2017. This study uses unique administrative accounting data for all SSB producers/importers in Portugal, and an event study design with bottled water firms as the primary comparison group, to assess the causal impacts of the tax on...

This paper estimates the causal effect of corporate tax hikes on firm investment based on more than 1,400 local tax changes. By observing planned and realized investment volumes in a representative sample of German manufacturing firms, we can study how tax hikes induce firms to revise their...