Early-stage firms utilize venture debt in one-third of financing rounds despite their general lack of cash flow and collateral. In our model, we show how venture debt aligns incentives within a firm. We derive a novel theoretical channel in which runway extension through debt increases firm...

The data-generating process of productivity growth includes both trend and business-cycle shocks, generating many counterfactuals for prices under full-information. In practice, agents cannot immediately distinguish between the two shocks, leading to ``rational confusion’’: each shock...

As of 2019, salary history bans have been enacted by 17 states and Puerto Rico with the stated purpose of reducing the gender pay gap. We argue that salary history bans may negatively affect wages as employers lose an informative signal of worker productivity. We empirically evaluate these laws...

Public calls for a national paid sick leave policy continue to grow in the United States. In the absence of a federal policy, many localities and states enacted their own paid sick leave mandates. We document an average increase of 1.9% in employment following the implementation of a paid sick...

Why do firms offer non-wage compensation instead of the equivalent amount in financial compensation? We argue that firms use non-wage benefits, specifically maternity leave, to efficiently target workers with desirable characteristics. Using Glassdoor data, we show that firms offer higher...

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...

Start-up entrepreneurs depend on M&A markets to exit VC investments. I test a novel catering theory of innovation: Does the market structure of potential acquirers impact entrepreneurial decision-making? Using CrunchBase and LinkedIn data, I find that a standard deviation increase in acquirer...