We show that wrongful discharge laws--laws that protect employees against unjust dismissal--spur innovation and new firm creation. Wrongful discharge laws, particularly those that prohibit employers from acting in bad faith ex post, limit employers' ability to hold up innovating employees after...

We show that wrongful discharge laws - laws that protect employees against unjust dismissal - spur innovation and new firm creation. Wrongful discharge laws, particularly those that prohibit employers from acting in bad faith ex post, limit employers' ability to hold up innovating employees...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>Rating agencies have become more conservative in assigning corporate credit ratings over the period 1985 to 2009; holding firm characteristics constant, average ratings have dropped by three notches. This change does not appear to be fully warranted because defaults have...</p>

When contracts are incomplete, dismissal laws prevent employers from arbitrarily discharging employees and thereby limit employers’ ability to hold up innovating employees after an innovation is successful. Therefore, dismissal laws can enhance employees’ innovative efforts and encourage...

Stringent labor laws can provide firms a commitment device to not punish short-run failures and thereby spur their employees to pursue value-enhancing innovative activities. Using patents and citations as proxies for innovation, we identify this effect by exploiting the time-series variation...

This paper examines how firm characteristics, the legal system and financial development affect corporate finance decisions using a novel and unexpored data set containing balance sheet information for listed and unlisted companies. Contrary to the previous literature, by using data on unlisted...

This paper argues that the liberalization of capital inflows in a small open economy with a financial system dominated by banks may provoke a soft budget constraint distortion, because large amounts of funds become available at relatively low cost. International investors internalize the risk of...

Why are skilled workers more mobile than average? What determines positive flows toward relatively poorer regions or states of a country? How can one explain the sharp decrease in the mobility rate observed within European countries notwithstanding persisten regional disparities. This paper aims...

This paper analyzes the optimal contracting consequences of a recent phenomenon in the managerial labour market, CEO job hopping. I show that if the managerial labour market is thin and firm growth opportunities are weak, the optimal contract rewards the CEO for past performance through a bonus....

This paper argues that in an open economy a banking system with close bank-firm relationships may be easily subject to contagious banking crises because it is difficult to distinguish between "crony capitalism" and "good" main bank relationships. 1 show that, if international investors cannot...