New firms do not yet have employees who can aid recruiting by referrals, but entrepreneurs can recruit workers they know to their startups--in effect making their own referrals. We consider new firms in Brazil's formal sector founded between 2002 and 2014, for which at least one founding owner...

"Using a comprehensive linked employer-employee database from Brazil for the period 1995-2001, we are able for the first time to compare firms founded as employee spinoffs to new firms without parents and to diversification ventures of existing firms entering a new industry. Employee spinoffs...

We present a set of empirical regularities that characterize the export activity of firms. We decompose firm-level exports by product category across destination markets in a consistent manner for four data sets from Brazil, Chile, Denmark, and Norway. We relate the empirical regularities to new...

Using data on German and Swedish multinational enterprises (MNEs), this paper analyzes determinants of international location choice and the degree of substitutability of labor across locations. Countries with highly skilled labor forces strongly attract German but not necessarily Swedish MNEs....