Entrepreneurship is essential for a healthy labor market. Recent evidence shows that young businesses (at most ten years old) have, on average, accounted for all of US employment growth over the past few decades. New businesses are especially important for youth employment. However, these...

Encouraging the growth of firms is a priority for many governments, so identifying the factors that keep firms small is extremely important for public policy. One of these factors might be the poor quality of institutions. In this paper, I test whether institutions such as corruption, law and...

Analyzing data on all U.S. employers in a cohort of entering firms, we document a highly skewed size distribution, such that the largest 5% account for over half of cohort employment at firm birth and more than two-thirds at firm age 7. Little of the size variation is accounted for by industry...