This paper describes information exchange under the Sugar Institute, the trade association of U.S. domestic sugar cane refiners, between 1928 and 1936. The Institute collected production and delivery data from the individual firms and returned it to them in aggregated form. Attempts to exchange...

Assessing the state of American entrepreneurship requires not simply counting the quantity but also the initial quality of new ventures. Combining comprehensive business registries and predictive analytics, we present estimates of entrepreneurial quantity and quality from 1988-2014. Rather than...

Economic growth is persistently low following a financial crisis, possibly because of a continuing weal banking system. In a financial crisis bank health is significantly damaged. Post-crisis regulatory changes have aimed at restoring bank health, but measuring bank health by Tobin's Q, we find...

The recent fall of labor's share of GDP in numerous countries is well-documented, but its causes are poorly understood. We sketch a “superstar firm” model where industries are increasingly characterized by “winner take most” competition, leading a small number of highly profitable (and...

Using linked employer-employee data for the U.S., we examine whether shocks to firm revenues are transmitted to the earnings of continuing employees. While full insurance is rejected, the elasticity of worker earnings with respect to persistent shocks in firm revenues is small and consistent...

We examine whether startups attract employees with different pecuniary and non-pecuniary motives than small or large established firms. We then explore whether such differences in employee motives lead to differences in innovative performance across firm types. Using data on over 10,000 U.S. R&D...

Maternity and family leave policies enable mothers to take time off work to prepare for and recover from childbirth and to care for their new children. While there is substantial variation in the details of these policies around the world, the existing research yields the following general...

We organized business associations for the owner-managers of randomly selected young Chinese firms to study the effect of business networks on firm performance. We randomized 2,800 firms into small groups whose managers held monthly meetings for one year, and into a “no- meetings” control...

Ex-post firm heterogeneity can result from different strategies to overcome labor market imperfections by ex-ante identical firms—with far-reaching consequences for the welfare effects of trade. With asymmetric information about workers' abilities and costly screening, in equilibrium some...

U.S. companies are often criticized for being overly short-term oriented. This paper documents that those criticisms have a long history, going back at least thirty-five years. The paper then considers the implications of sustained short-termism for corporate profits, venture capital investments...