OECD Regional Development Papers, No. 182, 2026
Motivated by policy attention to regional inequalities and the spatial dynamics of entrepreneurship, this paper investigates the geography of start-up entrepreneurship in Portugal, focusing on differences between rural and urban areas. Using a rich administrative matched employer-employee panel dataset covering all private-sector firms with at least one wage earner in Portugal from 2010 to 2022, it analyses who starts firms, where, and with what outcomes. The analysis documents differences in start-up entrepreneurship rates between rural and urban places, while conditioning for personal, firm and place-specific factors. It also presents evidence on differences in the survival and growth of these new firms.
Reject and Resubmit at American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.
IZA DP No. 16911, 2024
We provide evidence showing, for the first time, that the sensitivity of real wages to the business cycle is much stronger for higher-wage workers than for lower-wage workers. Using matched employer-employee data for Portugal covering the period 1986-2021, we show that a one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate is associated with a decrease in real hourly wages of workers in the 90th percentile of the conditional wage distribution of around 1.3%, contrasted with 0.8% for those in the 10th percentile. This gap is even larger for newly hired workers – the estimates for the 90th percentile workers are double of those in the bottom decile. This pattern also holds for bargained wages and the wage cushion. These results can be explained by composition effects and heterogeneous sensitivities of firms and collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) to the cycle. First, the considerable gap in new hires’ cyclicality arises mostly from match quality fluctuations over the business cycle and is sharply attenuated after we account for job match composition. Second, by estimating cyclicality coefficients for each firm/CBA, we find that firms and CBAs tend to provide a lower degree of insurance against aggregate cyclical fluctuations to higher paid individuals. These findings provide strong empirical evidence on the role of business cycles as amplifiers of inequality trends.
ECB Working Paper Series - No. 2751, 2023
This paper analyses the implications of corporate indebtedness for investment following large economic shocks. The empirical analysis is based on a large Orbis-iBACH firm-level data set for euro area countries from 2005 to 2018. Our results suggest that investment of high-debt firms is significantly depressed for an extended period in the aftermath of economic crises. In the four years after a negative economic shock, the cumulative loss of capital of high-debt firms is around 15% higher than that of firms with lower debt burdens. The negative impact of high debt on investment is most evident for firms in Southern and Eastern Europe and for micro firms. These findings suggest a potentially significant negative impact of increased corporate indebtedness on investment in the post-COVID-19 recovery.