There is an ongoing debate about the effect of changes in labor regulations such as Right-to-Work (RTW) laws on rising income inequality in the U.S. In this paper, we use a relatively new methodology, the Synthetic Control Method – which we argue is more suitable for analyzing this data – to...

There is an ongoing debate about whether changes in labor regulations such as the Right to Work (RTW) laws are contributing to the rising trend of income inequality in the U.S. We adopt the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) for comparative case study to examine the impact of a state's adoption of...

Social trust can facilitate access to alternative sources of finance to firms when formal finance is scarce or entails large transaction costs, especially in economies with less developed financial systems. Since exporting firms are relatively more dependent on external finance, we find that...