Private equity critics claim that leveraged buyouts bring huge job losses. To investigate this claim, we construct and analyze a new dataset that covers U.S. private equity transactions from 1980 to 2005. We track 3,200 target firms and their 150,000 establishments before and after acquisition,...

Investment decisions are inherently forward-looking. The payoff of acquiring capital goods, particularly long-lived capital goods, is governed almost exclusively by events in the far future. Because the timing of the investment itself does not affect future payoffs, there are strong incentives...

Economic theory assigns a central role to risk preferences. This paper develops a measure of relative risk tolerance using responses to hypothetical income gambles in the Health and Retirement Study. In contrast to most survey measures that produce an ordinal metric, this paper shows how to...

Private equity critics claim that leveraged buyouts bring huge job losses and few gains in operating performance. To evaluate these claims, we construct and analyze a new dataset that covers US buyouts from 1980 to 2005. We track 3,200 target firms and their 150,000 establishments before and...

An optimal pace of business dynamics—encompassing the processes of entry, exit, expansion, and contraction—would balance the benefits of productivity and economic growth against the costs to firms and workers associated with reallocation of productive resources. It is difficult to prescribe...

Unemployment inflows fell from 4 percent of employment per month in the early 1980s to 2 percent or less by the mid 1990s and thereafter. U.S. data also show a secular decline in the job destruction rate and the volatility of firm-level employment growth rates. We interpret this decline as a...

In this paper, we examine the relationship between the use of advanced technologies, such as information and communications technologies (ICT), and related business practices and outcomes such as productivity, employment, the skill mix of the workforce and wages using micro data for the U.S. and...

Micro and macro data integration should be an objective of economic measurement as it is clearly advantageous to have internally consistent measurement at all levels of aggregation – firm, industry and aggregate. In spite of the apparently compelling arguments, there are few measures of...