Nasir Hossein Dad 

We investigate how entrepreneurial human capital shapes the outside option of entrepreneurs when they return to paid work. To the extent that entrepreneurial human capital investment is specific to business ventures, and thus unrecoverable upon exit, former entrepreneurs suffer a wage loss when returning to paid work. Using data on Portuguese work histories, we find that entrepreneurial wage loss is 13 percent immediately after returning to paid work and persists for 8 years. We show that wage losses increase with entrepreneurial experience: the wage loss of return entrepreneurs with 1 year of entrepreneurial experience persists for 4 years while those with 10 years of experience do not surpass never-entrepreneurs in our sample time frame. Our results imply that return entrepreneurs select into sectors and locations with relatively low wages.

I study the impact of equity frictions and policy distortions on aggregate productivity, investments in productivity and average firm size. I document that economies with deeper equity markets have higher productivity, invest more in productivity, have larger firms on average and exhibit lower elasticity of productivity to distortions. I build and calibrate a general equilibrium model with endogenous entry and productivity investments and find that equity frictions and policy distortions can account for up to 50 percent of TFP losses. I show that the equity frictions amplify the productivity effect of distortionary policies by affecting productivity investment channel, dampening aggregate productivity and economic growth.

We study the impact of corporate lobbying on firm dynamics, innovation, and creative destruction. Using a novel dataset of US firms and their lobbying activities from 1998 to 2020, we integrate firm-level balance sheets, lobbying data, and patent information from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Our findings reveal that firm-level lobbying is concentrated among large firms and sectors with higher lobbying shares experience poorer firm dynamics and increased market concentration. Market leaders exhibit less lobbying and innovation intensity compared to competitors, highlighting a missing leadership paradox. We quantify lobbying's influence on firm survival and show that lobbying firms have notably higher survival probabilities, which increase monotonically with lobbying expenditure. At the firm-level lobbying is linked to decreased output and labor productivity growth.

This paper gauges how inequality evolves over the life cycle when controlling for time and cohort effects. To differentiate between time and cohort effects we construct two alternative empirical  models using the Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF) from 1989-2016.   We demonstrate that the choice of whether to control for cohort effects or for time effects has a drastic impact on the estimated age profiles for inequality and, thus provides insights to households ability to insure against labor market risks . It also shows that cohort effects are required to account of the observed trends in inequality in 30 years of U.S. data, whereas there is no evidence that time effects have been important.

Outside options determine whether a firm owner continues in business or exit; likewise, it determines whether a business opportunity is worth pursuing. We document that entrepreneurship is extremely risky because pursuing entrepreneurship is associated with a deterioration of the return option to paid work. Using data on Portuguese work histories, we find that entrepreneurs suffer large and persistent wage losses upon returning to paid work; relative to individuals who never entered entrepreneurship, returning entrepreneurs face a 20\% lifetime wage loss. The effect is more pronounced for individuals with longer stints in entrepreneurship and individuals with higher education. We find that a component of this loss arises from composition effects, where returning entrepreneurs work in sectors, locations, and firms that offer lower wages. We argue that this wage loss arises because human capital accumulated in entrepreneurship is only partially transferable to paid work.

Over the last decades, the US labor market has experienced polarization that translates in (i) an increase in the share of employment in low-skill (services) and high-skill occupations and (ii) a faster increase in real wages at the bottom and top of the skill distribution . Over the same period, there has also been a slowdown in the growth in educational attainment (Castro and Coen-Pirani (2016) and Keller (2014)). While there has been an extensive literature on the source of labor market polarization, less is known about the implications for the incentives to invest in human capital accumulation and education. In this paper, we reconcile these two trends. In particular, we  investigate how the change in relative wages between occupations and the change in the probability with (without) a college degree of joining occupations along the skill distribution has affected the incentives to obtain a college degree.