John, Thank you for your post. I'm skeptical about the effects of the NJTC for reasons you and Howard mention--problems of causality and the possibility that those who knew about the credit were systematically different and more likely to hire than those who didn't. Is there any experience with state credits? That wouldn't entirely solve problems of spurious correlation, since states that offered credits might be in a different economic situation from those that didn't, but the differences might be controlled for more easily than in cross-firm regressions.