If unemployment insurance is more generous, workers should demand less implicit insurance from their employers: firm- and government-provided insurance should be substitutes. Using a firm-level international panel dataset, we investigate this hypothesis exploiting cross-country and time-series...

Corporate leverage responds differently to employees' rights in bankruptcy depending on whether it is driven by strategic concerns in wage bargaining or by credit constraints. Using novel data on employees' rights in bankruptcy, we estimate their impact on leverage, exploiting time-series,...

We establish that the labor market helps discipline asset managers via the impact of fund liquidations on their careers. Using hand-collected data on 1,948 professionals, we find that top managers working for funds liquidated after persistently poor relative performance suffer demotion coupled...

Entrepreneurs may be constrained by the law to bequeath a minimal stake to non-controlling heirs. The size of this stake can reduce investment in family firms, by reducing the future income they can pledge to external financiers. Using a purpose-built indicator of the permissiveness of...