How large is geographic leakage resulting from place-based environmental policy? We study this question in the context of the landmark US Clean Air Act Amendments. Our paper makes three primary contributions. First, using modern event-study techniques and confidential data from the US Census Bureau, we revisit seminal results that characterize the effects of this environmental regulation on directly regulated plants and industries. Second, we extend prior work by quantifying leakage to unregulated regions and identifying multi-unit firms as a key pathway through which this leakage occurs. Our third contribution is to combine these new results with an industry equilibrium model that captures both within-firm and cross-location leakage. The model quantifies the economic cost of the regulation, the contribution of multi-unit firms to leakage across regions and the role of the Clean Air Act in redistributing industrial production across the US.

What are the returns of private and public funding of research and development expenses in terms of patents and productivity? We compile a database of patents that were generated with funding from government agencies and are in the process of linking it to firm-level R&D expenditures and productivity data from the U.S. Census Bureau. This will allow us to analyze the “patent yield” of public versus private R&D funding and evaluate the impact of these funding sources on firm-level innovation and revenue productivity.

This paper examines the effect of nascent acquisitions on innovation across industries under general equilibrium conditions. I develop a model that incorporates firm entry decisions, R&D investment, acquisitions, and post-acquisition development, emphasizing the differences in R&D costs and success rates between incumbents and new entrants. Findings reveal that M&As have varied effects: they promote entry and innovation in high-barrier industries like pharmaceuticals but may hinder innovation in low-barrier industries like software. Empirical data supports these conclusions, showing a positive correlation between firm entry and M&A volume in the pharmaceutical industry but not in the software industry.

The aggregate labor share in China's industrial sector rapidly declined from 24.7% in 1998 to 16.3% in 2007, with reductions across almost all industries and regions, primarily occurring within firm rather than through reallocation. Comparing state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private enterprises (PEs) shows SOEs initially had higher labor shares due to overstaffing. SOE reforms led to convergence in labor shares between SOEs and PEs by 2007. The dramatic reduction in SOE labor share was mainly due to the elimination of small SOEs and layoffs.