We study the leverage of U.S. firms over their life-cycles, and the connection between firm leverage, firm growth, and aggregate shocks. We construct a new dataset that combines private and public firms' balance sheets with firm-level data from U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database...

Do recessions speed up or impede productivity-enhancing reallocation? To investigate this question, we use U.S. linked employer-employee data to examine how worker flows contribute to productivity growth over the business cycle. We find that in expansions high-productivity firms grow faster...

Most of the rise in overall earnings inequality is accounted for by rising between-industry dispersion from about ten percent of 4-digit NAICS industries. These thirty industries are in the tails of the earnings distribution, and are clustered especially in high-paying high-tech and low-paying...