This paper identifies the effect of financing constraints on firms’ labor demand. We exploit exogenous funding shocks to German savings banks during the US mortgage crisis that are unrelated to local conditions. We find that firms with credit relationships with affected banks experienced a significant decline in employment and in labor compensation relative to firms whose credit relationships w...

Public-works programs in developing countries have recently attracted a lot of attention as anti-poverty initiatives. This paper analyzes the labor-market impacts of the largest public-works program in the world, the Indian NREGS, using information about its rollout in a regression-discontinuity design. The results suggest that the overall employment and casual wage impacts are small, although ...

We use experimental data from a résumé audit to estimate the impact of particular college majors and internship experience on employment prospects. Despite applying exclusively to business-related job openings, we find no evidence that business degrees improve employment prospects. By contrast, internship experience increases the interview rate by 14 percent. The returns to internship experienc...

In Lentz and Mortensen (2005), we formulate and estimate a market equilibrium model of endogenous growth through product innovation in the spirit of Klette and Kortum (2004). In this paper, we provide a quantitative solution to the social planner’s problem in the modeled environment. We find that the optimal growth rate is over three times larger than its value in market equilibrium and that th...

In this paper we study the semiclassical asymptotics of the 6j symbols for the representation theory of the quantized enveloping algebra Uq(sl2) for q a primitive root of unity. Because of the work of Finkelberg [7], these 6j symbols can also be defined in terms of fusion product of representations of the affine Lie algebra ŝl2, defined using Wess-Zumino-Witten conformal field theory. This asso...

Previous research has identified non-diversifiable risk and a preference for “being one’s own boss” as key determinants of participation in self-employment. Using a simple model of occupational choice, I show how both factors can cause efficiency losses in a free market economy, and how linear differential occupational taxation can improve on the market outcome. A simulation exercise calibrated...

We present a cryptanalysis of the ASASA public key cipher introduced at Asiacrypt 2014 [3]. This scheme alternates three layers of affine transformations A with two layers of quadratic substitutions S. We show that the partial derivatives of the public key polynomials contain information about the intermediate layer. This enables us to present a very simple distinguisher between an ASASA public...

We analyze the causes and mechanisms of inequality in Post-Soviet Union transition economies. First, we show that both economic globalisation – namely, import, export, and foreign direct investment – and institutional factors – namely, privatisation reforms, labour market liberalisation, and product market liberalisation – are strongly associated with within-country rises in inequality. However...

[1] The question of whether the cross polar cap potential drop in the Earth’s ionosphere saturates under conditions of extreme electric field in the solar wind has been tested observationally during the past several years. The challenge to proving the existence of this phenomenon is that periods of such extreme electric fields in the solar wind are relatively rare. The three superstorms of Octo...

The complete sequences of RNA1, RNA2 and satellite RNA have been determined for a South African isolate of Grapevine fanleaf virus (GFLV-SACH44). The two RNAs of GFLV-SACH44 are 7,341 nucleotides (nt) and 3,816 nt in length, respectively, and its satellite RNA (satRNA) is 1,104 nt in length, all excluding the poly(A) tail. Multiple sequence alignment of these sequences showed that GFLV-SACH44 R...