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This paper examines the quality of citizenship data in self-reported survey responses compared to administrative records and evaluates options for constructing an accurate count of resident U.S. citizens. Person-level discrepancies between survey-collected citizenship data and administrative records are more pervasive than previously reported in studies comparing survey and administrative data aggregates. Our results imply that survey-sourced citizenship data produce significantly lower estimates of the noncitizen share of the population than would be produced from currently available administrative records; both the survey-sourced and administrative data have shortcomings that could contribute to this difference. Our evidence is consistent with noncitizen respondents misreporting their own citizenship status and failing to report that of other household members. At the same time, currently available administrative records may miss some naturalizations and capture others with a delay. The evidence in this paper also suggests that adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census would lead to lower self-response rates in households potentially containing noncitizens, resulting in higher fieldwork costs and a lower-quality population count.

We analyze linked databases on all Small Business Administration (SBA) loans, on all SBA lenders, and on all U.S. employers to estimate the effects of financial access on employment growth. Our methods combine regressions with matching on firm age, size, industry, year, and employment history, and with instrumental variables capturing ease of access to SBA lenders. The estimation results imply an increase of 3-4 jobs for each million dollars of loans, suggesting that credit constraints impede small business growth prior to loan receipt. We also investigate the variation in estimated employment effects for the SBA 504 versus 7(a) programs, and with respect to the business cycle, local credit conditions, and within-county versus non-SBA county-industry control firms. Finally, for loans issued over the 1992-2007 period, we estimate total job creation of 1.0-2.1 million and the government's cost per job of $8,200-$18,000 measured five years after the loan year.

Small Business Administration (SBA) loans have long been one of the most significant policy interventions in the U.S. affecting firm behavior, but little is known about their outcomes. This paper estimates the effects on employment using a list of all SBA loans linked to annual data on all U.S. employers from 1976 to 2010. Our methods combine firm fixed-effect regressions with matching on exact firm age, industry, year, and pre-loan size, and on propensity scores as a function of four years of employment history and other variables. The results imply positive average effects on loan recipient employment of about 25 percent, or 3 jobs at the mean. Including loan amount, we find little or no impact of loan receipt per se, but an increase of about 5.4 jobs for each million dollars of loans. Similar results for high-growth counties and industries suggest the estimates are not driven by differential demand conditions across firms. Exploiting variation in the distance of controls from recipient firms, we find only very small displacement effects. In all these cases, the results pass "placebo" and "pre-program" specification tests. Other specifications using only matching or only regression imply somewhat higher effects, but they fail these tests. The estimates facilitate calculations of total job creation by the SBA and of the cost per job created.

We analyze comprehensive manufacturing firm data to measure the contribution of inter-firm employment reallocation to aggregate productivity growth during the socialist and reform periods in six transition economies. Modifying a standard decomposition technique to better reflect the role of firm entry, we find that reallocation rates and productivity contributions are very low under socialism. After reforms, they rise dramatically, and productivity contributions greatly exceed those observed in market economies. Early in transition, faster reform is associated with larger contributions from reallocation, but later, and on average over the whole transition, this relationship is reversed. Though reallocation rates are larger in faster reforming economies, higher productivity dispersion in slower reformers creates much higher productivity gains for a given volume of reallocation. The results imply that reallocation should be viewed as necessary regular maintenance for a well-functioning economy, and particularly large productivity contributions tend to reflect previous neglect more than current virtue.

The ADM Hamiltonian formulation of general relativity with prescribed lapse and shift is a weakly hyperbolic system of partial differential equations. In general weakly hyperbolic systems are not mathematically well posed. For well posedness, the theory should be reformulated so that the complete system, evolution equations plus gauge conditions, is (at least) strongly hyperbolic. Traditionally, reformulation has been carried out at the level of equations of motion. This typically destroys the variational and Hamiltonian structures of the theory. Here I show that one can extend the ADM formalism to (i) incorporate the gauge conditions as dynamical equations and (ii) affect the hyperbolicity of the complete system, all while maintaining a Hamiltonian description. The extended ADM formulation is used to obtain a strongly hyperbolic Hamiltonian description of Einstein's theory that is generally covariant under spatial diffeomorphisms and time reparametrizations, and has physical characteristics. The extended Hamiltonian formulation with 1+log slicing and gamma--driver shift conditions is weakly hyperbolic., Comment: This version contains minor corrections and clarifications. The format has been changed to conform with IOP style

The challenge for labor market policy in the transition economies has been to redress the sharp drops in employment and rises in unemployment in a way that fosters the creation of productive jobs. The authors first document the magnitude and productivity of job and worker reallocation. Then they investigate the effects of privatization, product and labor market liberalization, and obstacles to growth inthe new private sector on reallocation and its productivity in Hungary, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. The authors find that market reform has resulted in a large increase in the pace of job reallocation, particularly that occurring between sectors and through firm turnover. Unlike under central planning, the job reallocation during the transition has contributed significantly to aggregate productivity growth. Privatization has not only stimulated intrasectoral job reallocation, but the reallocation is more productive than that among remaining state firms. The effect of privatization on firm productivity varies considerably across countries and is not always positive. The productivity gains from privatization have generally not come at the expense of workers but are rather associated with increased wages and employment.

We analyse the impact of privatization on multifactor productivity (MFP) using long panel data for nearly the universe of initially state-owned manufacturing firms in four economies. Controlling for firm and industry-year fixed effects and employing a wide variety of measurement approaches, we estimate that majority privatization raises MFP about 28% in Romania, 22% in Hungary, and 3% in Ukraine, with some variation across specifications, while in Russia it lowers it about 4%. Privatization to foreign rather than domestic investors has a larger impact (about 44%) and is much more consistent across countries. The positive effects emerge within a year in Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine and continue to grow thereafter, but are still ambiguous even after 5 years in Russia. Pre-privatization MFP exceeds that of firms remaining state-owned in all countries, implying that cross-sectional estimates overstate privatization effects. The patterns of the estimated effects cast doubt on a number of explanations for ‘when privatization works’.

How do economic policies and institutions affect job reallocation processes and their consequences for productivity growth? This Paper studies the extreme case of economic system change and alternative transitional policies in the former Soviet Republics of Russia and Ukraine. Exploiting annual manufacturing census data from 1985 to 2000, we find that Soviet Russia displayed job flow behaviour quite different from market economies, with very low rates of job reallocation that bear little relationship to relative productivity across firms and sectors. Since liberalization began, the pace, heterogeneity, and productivity effects of job flows have increased substantially. The increases occurred more quickly in rapidly reforming Russia than in ‘gradualist’ Ukraine, as did the estimated effects of privatization and competitive pressures from product and labor markets on excess job reallocation and on the productivity-enhancing effects of job flows.

Gross job and worker flows in Russian industry are studied using panel data from a recent survey of 530 firms selected through national probability sampling. The data permit an examination of several important measurement issues – including the timing and definition of employment, the roles of split-ups and mergers, and the relative magnitudes of rehiring and new hiring and of quits and layoffs – and they contain a rich set of firm characteristics that may affect job and worker turnover. The results imply that job destruction and worker separation rates in industrial firms rose in the early 1990s, as did job flows as a fraction of worker flows, and layoffs as a fraction of separations. By contrast, job creation and worker hiring rates were flat until 1999, the former low and the latter surprisingly high. Heterogeneity in individual firm behavior increased throughout. New firms and old enterprises that have been reorganized display much larger flows compared with unreorganized enterprises. Unions appear to reduce worker flows, but the structure of neither product nor labour markets shows a significant impact. Private ownership has ambiguous effects: insider ownership, particularly by managers, is associated with higher worker flows and excess job reallocation, while outsider ownership, particularly by blockholders, is associated with lower flow rates. A measure of adjustment costs constructed from the worktime necessary to hire and train a new employee is strongly related to variables usually associated with adjustment costs, including worker wage, education, firm size, capital intensity, and labour productivity, but only weakly to job and worker turnover. Little evidence is found that firms’ employment adjustments have become more sensitive to adjustment costs during the transition, but worker and manager ownership are associated with more sensitivity than are other types of ownership.

This Paper investigates whether the efficiency effect of product market dispersion is a function of the infrastructural and policy environment. We hypothesise that more developed transportation and communication infrastructure and lower government regulation may reduce transaction costs, intensifying the competition associated with a given market structure, and we use data from the recently liberalized and regionally diverse country of Russia to test the hypothesis. Estimating translog production functions on a large 1992-99 panel of manufacturing firms, we find that the efficiency impact of market dispersion varies positively with the regional density of highway, railroad and telephone infrastructure, but negatively with regional price regulation and the share of votes received by the Communist Party.

This Paper uses 1985-99 manufacturing census data for old Russian enterprises to calculate the magnitude and productivity effects of gross job flow rates before and after reforms. Job creation was low throughout the period in this sector, but increased slightly during the transition, while job destruction rose markedly. Heterogeneity in firm employment change also increased significantly. Intra- and inter-sectoral job reallocation had no effect on aggregate labour productivity during the socialist period, while they have made a strong positive contribution during the transition. Privatization and product market competition have not led to greater job destruction overall, but rather have helped to focus the destruction in the firms with the lowest productivity.

A critical, but largely unexamined assumption in the debate over reform policy design, concerns the complementarity or substitutability of market competition and private ownership in increasing firm efficiency. We analyse a simple Cournot model that distinguishes two aspects of privatization interacting with market opening: privatization of a firm and privatization of its competitors. Under plausible conditions, the model implies that privatizing a firm is a substitute for exposing it to competitive markets, but privatizing its competitors is complementary. Our empirical analysis uses augmented 3-factor translog production functions estimated on 1992-99 panel data for 13,288 Russian manufacturing enterprises. We find that nonstate ownership of a firm reduces the marginal efficiency impact from product market dispersion, but the share of its competitors that are nonstate increases this marginal impact. Disaggregating nonstate ownership, we find that the shares of competitors in all three nonstate types are complementary with dispersed market structure, where the strongest complementarity involves foreign ownership. The evidence suggests that an important indirect impact of private ownership may be the intensification of market competition, and thus that competition only among state-owned enterprises may be ineffectual in stimulating them to increase efficiency.

The 'big-bang' liberalization of the inefficient Russian economy in 1992 provides a fruitful setting for analysing the impact of several dimensions of market competition and other factors on enterprise efficiency. We analyse 1992-1998 panel data on 14,961 enterprises covering 75 percent of industrial employment, emphasizing the varied sources, geographic scope, intensity, time path, and survival effects of competitive pressures. We find large, positive effects on TFP from competition in domestic product and local labour markets, and from imports and better transportation infrastructure, although the first effect appears only gradually. Non-state firms outperform state enterprises, even after correction for selection bias.

In this paper we re-examine empirically the Structure-Conduct-Performance relationship between concentration and profitability using new data on Russia that allow us to overcome the endogeneity problem of market structure and expand on the traditional analysis in several ways. The analysis yields several important results. We find strong evidence that national concentration does increase profitability, but only in geographically dispersed industries, suggesting that regional markets are an important source of market power for oligopolistic industries. We find preliminary evidence that the effects of market structure are persistent in the long run. And we find for Russia that capital intensity is negatively related to profitability, suggesting that capital-intensive industries face higher adjustment costs and thus are less profitable after recessionary shocks.

The authors have introduced recently a ``microcanonical functional integral" which yields directly the density of states as a function of energy. The phase of the functional integral is Jacobi's action, the extrema of which are classical solutions at a given energy. This approach is general but is especially well suited to gravitating systems because for them the total energy can be fixed simply as a boundary condition on the gravitational field. In this paper, however, we ignore gravity and illustrate the use of Jacobi's action by computing the density of states for a nonrelativistic harmonic oscillator. (Festschrift for Dieter Brill), Comment: 10 pages, plain tex. (This replaces the previous version which consisted of less than half of the manuscript.)

We present a new fully first-order strongly hyperbolic representation of the Baumgarte-Shapiro-Shibata-Nakamura formulation of Einstein's equations with optional constraint damping terms. We describe the characteristic fields of the system, discuss its hyperbolicity properties, and present two numerical implementations and simulations: one using finite differences, adaptive mesh refinement, and, in particular, binary black holes, and another one using the discontinuous Galerkin method in spherical symmetry. The results of this paper constitute a first step in an effort to combine the robustness of Baumgarte-Shapiro-Shibata-Nakamura evolutions with very high accuracy numerical techniques, such as spectral collocation multidomain or discontinuous Galerkin methods.