This study estimates the firm-level employment effects of investment grants in Germany. In addition to the average treatment effect on the treated, we examine discrimination in the funding rules as a potential source of effect heterogeneity. We combine a staggered difference-in-differences approach with a matching procedure at the cohort level. The findings reveal a positive effect of investment grants on employment development. The subsample analyses yield strong evidence for heterogeneous effects based on firm characteristics and the economic environment. They highlight the responsibility of the local funding authorities to clarify ex ante which goals of a funding programme are most important in their regions.

There is an ongoing debate about the economic effects of individualism. We establish that individualism leads to better educational and labor market outcomes. Using data from the largest international adult skill assessment, we identify the effects of individualism by exploiting variation between migrants at the origin country, origin language, and person level. Migrants from more individualistic cultures have higher cognitive skills and larger skill gains over time. They also invest more in their skills over the life-cycle, as they acquire more years of schooling and are more likely to participate in adult education activities. In fact, individualism is more important in explaining adult skill formation than any other cultural trait that has been emphasized in previous literature. In the labor market, more individualistic migrants earn higher wages and are less often unemployed. We show that our results cannot be explained by selective migration or omitted origin-country variables.

The effects of private equity buyouts on employment, productivity, and job reallocation vary tremendously with macroeconomic and credit conditions, across private equity groups, and by type of buyout. We reach this conclusion by examining the most extensive database of U.S. buyouts ever compiled, encompassing thousands of buyout targets from 1980 to 2013 and millions of control firms. Employment shrinks 12% over two years after buyouts of publicly listed firms—on average, and relative to control firms—but expands 15% after buyouts of privately held firms. Postbuyout productivity gains at target firms are large on average and much larger yet for deals executed amid tight credit conditions. A postbuyout tightening of credit conditions or slowing of gross domestic product growth curtails employment growth and intrafirm job reallocation at target firms. We also show that buyout effects differ across the private equity groups that sponsor buyouts, and these differences persist over time at the group level. Rapid upscaling in deal flow at the group level brings lower employment growth at target firms. We relate these findings to theories of private equity that highlight agency problems at portfolio firms and within the private equity industry itself.

Spatial segregation of low- and high-wage workers is a persistent economic issue with broad social implications. Using social security data and an AKM wage decomposition, this paper examines spatial wage inequality in West Germany. Spatial inequality in log wages rose sharply between 1998 and 2008, mainly due to increased variance in worker pay premiums across regions (48%) and stronger positive spatial assortative matching of workers and establishments (40%), i.e. colocation. Changes in establishment wage premia are mostly unrelated to rising colocation whereas labor mobility even reduced it. Instead, growth in worker pay premiums among stayers was concentrated in regions where high-wage workers and high-wage establishments were overrepresented already in the 1990s and, thus, magnified pre-existing colocation leading to ‘colocation without relocation’. Germany’s rising trade surplus, especially with Eastern Europe, boosted stayers’ worker pay premiums in those ex-ante high-wage regions and fully explains rising colocation.

Using brand-level sales data from Chinese e-commerce platforms, this study examines how geopolitical tensions affect multinational brands operating in China. Merging these sales data with a U.S.–China tension index, we use panel regressions and local projections to show that rising tensions significantly reduce the market share of U.S. brands in China relative to brands from other countries, with the effects persisting for up to 12 months. An event study employing a difference-in-differences framework, centered on brand-specific incidents of political tension with China, reveals similar market share declines among affected brands, highlighting consumer sentiment as a key transmission channel.

We compare the effects of external financing shocks on patient mortality at nonprofit and for-profit hospitals. Using confidential patient-level data, we find that patient mortality increases to a lesser extent at nonprofit hospitals than at for-profit ones facing exogenous, negative shocks to debt capacity. Such an effect is not driven by patient characteristics or their choices of hospitals. It is concentrated among patients without private insurance and patients with higher-risk diagnoses. Potential economic mechanisms include nonprofit hospitals' having deeper cash reserves and greater ability to maintain spending on medical staff and equipment, even at the expense of lower profitability. Overall, our evidence suggests that nonprofit organizations can better serve social interests during financially challenging times.

We exploit an information shock related to the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act and use detailed customs data to analyze how smaller, non-listed firms respond when expecting accountability for externalities beyond their organizational boundaries. Product-level regressions reveal a substantial reduction in imports from high ESG-risk production sectors. Adjustments occur mainly at the extensive margin, indicating that firms cut ties with high-risk suppliers. The product-level results translate into meaningful changes in overall international procurement for firms with Big Four auditors. Our findings suggest potential limits to mandates requiring firms to integrate broad sustainability considerations into operational decisions.

We study the effects of Tax Authority (IRS) attention on a firm’s financial reporting. We explore whether firms institute a higher degree of accounting conservatism in response to IRS monitoring. Using data on IRS acquisition of public firms’ 10-K financial disclosures to proxy for IRS attention, we find that when firms are under IRS attention, they tend to initiate higher levels of unconditional and, to some extent, conditional accounting conservatism. We alleviate some of the endogeneity concerns by using pre- and post-IRS attention environments between the treated group (firms with IRS attention) and a propensity score that matches the control group of firms (no IRS attention). These results withstand several robustness tests and subsample analyses.

In this study, establishment-level employment effects of investment grants in Germany are estimated. In addition to the quantitative effects, I provide empirical evidence of funding effects on different aspects of employment quality (earnings, qualifications, and job security) for the period 2004 to 2020. The database combines project-level treatment data, establishment-level information on firm characteristics and employee structure, and regional information at the district-level. For the estimations, I combine the difference-in-differences approach of Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021) with ties matching at the cohort level. The estimations yield positive effects on the number of employees, but point to contradicting effects of investment grants on different aspects of employment quality.

We investigate how global banks’ macroeconomic expectations for borrower countries influence their credit supply. Utilizing granular data on varying expectations among banks lending to the same firm at the same time, combined with an instrumental variable approach, we find that more optimistic GDP growth expectations for a borrower country are strongly linked to increased credit supply. Specifically, a one standard deviation increase in a lender’s GDP growth expectation for the borrower’s country corresponds to an increase of 8.46 percentage points in the loan share, equivalent to approximately 0.75 standard deviations of the loan share and $75.35 million in loan amount. In contrast, global banks’ short-term inflation expectations do not show a significant impact on their credit supply.