ABSTRACT We investigate the economic value of cash management. In the legal marijuana industry, where only half of businesses have access to cash management services from a financial institution, we examine dispensary profitability using administrative and survey data. Our results show that businesses with cash management charge higher retail prices (8.3%), pay lower wholesale prices (7.3%), and have higher sales volume (19%). Together, these advantages create a 40% increase in profitability. These results support our model in which reputational capital and administrative costs drive profitability regardless of whether national banks, credit unions, or fintech provide the cash management functions.

ABSTRACT Using a novel empirical approach and newly available administrative data on U.S. tax filings, we estimate the corporate elasticity of taxable income, decompose the elasticity into economic responses versus other tax‐motivated “accounting” transactions, and determine how responsiveness varies depending on accounting method, firm size, and interest rate. In response to a 10% increase in the expected marginal tax rate, private U.S. firms decrease taxable income by 9.1%, which indicates a discernibly more elastic response than prevailing estimates. This response reflects a decrease in taxable income of 3.0% arising from real economic responses to a firm's scale of operations and 6.1% arising from accounting transactions via (for example) revenue and expense timing. Responsiveness to the corporate tax rate is more elastic if a firm uses cash (9.9%) rather than accrual accounting (7.4%), if the firm is small (9.9%) rather than large (8.6%), and if the firm discounts future cash flows at a lower rate.

We conducted a field experiment in a sales firm to test whether improving knowledge flows between coworkers affects productivity. Our design allows us to compare different management practices and isolate whether frictions to knowledge transmission primarily reside with knowledge seekers, knowledge providers, or both. We find large productivity gains from treatments that reduced frictions for knowledge seekers. Workers who were encouraged to seek advice from a randomly chosen partner during structured meetings had average sales gains exceeding 15%. These effects lasted at least 20 weeks after the experiment ended. Treatments intended to change knowledge providers’ willingness to share information, in the form of incentives tied to partners’ joint output, led to positive—but transitory—sales gains. Directing coworkers to share knowledge raised average productivity and reduced output dispersion between workers, highlighting the role that management practices play in generating spillovers inside the firm.

We provide a method to track the active prevalence of COVID-19 in real time, correcting for time-varying sample selection in symptom-based testing data and incomplete tracking of recovered cases and fatalities. Our method only requires publicly available data on positive testing rates in combination with one parameter, which we estimate based on a representative randomized sample of nearly 10,000 individuals tested in Utah in May and June 2020. We validate our method using external studies in Indiana in April 2020 and two counties in Utah in March 2021. In all three locations and times, our estimates of latent prevalence are within the 95 percent confidence intervals of prevalence estimates from randomized testing. Applying our method to all 50 states, we show that true prevalence is 2–3 times higher than publicly reported.