It is well established that job loss has a negative impact on workers' career trajectories, but little is known about the mediating effect of transitions into self-employment. Using a rich data set of the universe of formal employment records in Brazil matched with detailed data on business ownership, I leverage mass displacement events to investigate the link between job loss,...
We analyze the effect of rising protectionism towards foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestic employment, exploiting revisions in Indonesia's highly-granular negative investment list, and spatial variation in the exposure of the manufacturing sector to these investment restrictions. Rising restrictions caused employment gains at the local level. In our main specification, FDI regulation...
This paper analyzes how a natural disaster affects the spatial distribution of establishments and workers, using the devastating 2008 Santa Catarina Flash Flood (Brazil) as a natural experiment. We combine synthetic-aperture radar images that show the exact location of flood spots with geocoded employer-employee data to estimate the impact of the disaster. We find that establishments in...
