We examine effects of government-imposed employment targets on firm behavior. Theoretically, such policies create “polarization,“ causing low-productivity firms to exit the market while others temporarily distort their employment upward. Dynamically, firms are incentivized to improve productivity to meet targets. Using novel data from East German firms post-privatization, we find that firms with binding employment targets experienced 25% higher annual employment growth, a 1.1% higher annual exit probability, and 10% higher annual productivity growth over the target period. Structural estimates reveal substantial misallocation of labor across firms and that subsidizing productivity growth would yield twice the long term increases in employment.

We study the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and related policy support on productivity. We employ an extensive micro-distributed exercise to access otherwise unavailable individual data on firm performance and government subsidies. Our cross-country evidence for five EU countries shows that the pandemic led to a significant short-term decline in aggregate productivity and the direct support to firms had only a limited positive effect on productivity developments. A thorough comparative analysis of the distribution of employment and overall direct subsidies, considering separately also relative firm-level size of support and the probability of being supported, reveals ambiguous cross-country results related to the firm-level productivity and points to the decisive role of other firm characteristics.

We hypothesize and empirically establish that economic preferences for risk-taking in different subnational regions affect firm financing costs. We study this hypothesis by hand-matching firms' regions worldwide with the corresponding regional economic risk-taking preferences. We first show that higher regional risk-taking is positively associated with several measures of firm risk and investments. Subsequently, our baseline results show that credit and bond pricing increase when risk-taking preferences increase. For the loan of average size and maturity a one-standard-deviation increase in regional risk-taking increases interest expense by $0.54 million USD. We also find that these results are demand (firm)-driven and stronger for firms with more local shareholders.

Several models posit a positive cross-sectional correlation between markups and firm size, which characterizes misallocation, factor shares, and gains from trade. Accounting for labor market power in markup estimation, we find instead that larger firms have lower product markups but higher wage markdowns. The negative markup-size correlation turns positive when conditioning on markdowns, suggesting interactions between product and labor market power. Our findings are robust to common criticism (e.g., price bias, non-neutral technology) and hold across 19 European countries. We discuss possible mechanisms and resulting implications, highlighting the importance of studying input and output market power in a unified framework.

Several models posit a positive cross-sectional correlation between markups and firm size, which characterizes misallocation, factor shares, and gains from trade. Accounting for labor market power in markup estimation, we find instead that larger firms have lower product markups but higher wage markdowns. The negative markup-size correlation turns positive when conditioning on markdowns, suggesting interactions between product and labor market power. Our findings are robust to common criticism (e.g., price bias, non-neutral technology) and hold across 19 European countries. We discuss possible mechanisms and resulting implications, highlighting the importance of studying input and output market power in a unified framework.

This study provides firm-level evidence on the effect of capital account liberalization on total factor productivity (TFP) growth. We find that a one standard deviation increase in the capital account openness indicator constructed by Fernández et al. (2016) is significantly associated with a 0.18 standard deviation increase in firms’ TFP growth rates. The productivity-enhancing effects are stronger for sectors with higher external finance dependence and capital-skill complementarity, and are persistent five years after liberalization. Moreover, we show that potential transmission mechanisms include improved financing conditions, greater skilled labor utilization, and technology upgrades. Finally, we document heterogeneous effects across firm size and tradability, and threshold effects with respect to the country's institutional quality.

This paper provides both theoretical and empirical analyses of the differences between BigTech lenders and traditional banks in response to monetary policy changes. Our model integrates Knightian uncertainty into portfolio selection and posits that BigTech lenders possess a diminishing informational advantage with increasing firm size, resulting in reduced ambiguity when lending to smaller firms. The model suggests that the key distinction between BigTech lenders and traditional banks in response to shifts in funding costs, triggered by monetary policy changes, is more evident at the extensive margin rather than the intensive margin, particularly during periods of easing monetary policy. Using a micro-level dataset of small business loans from both types of lenders, we provide empirical support for our theoretical propositions. Our results show that BigTech lenders are more responsive in establishing new lending relationships in an easing monetary policy environment, while the differences in loan amounts are not statistically significant. We also discuss other loan terms and the implications of regulatory policies.

This paper analyses the effect of offshoring (i.e., the relocation of activities previously performed in-house to foreign countries) on various firm outcomes (domestic employment, production, and productivity). It uses data from the International Sourcing Survey (ISS) 2017 for Germany, linked to other firm level data such as business register and ITGS data. First, we find that offshoring is a rare event: In the sample of firms with 50 or more persons employed, only about 3% of manufacturing firms and 1% of business service firms have performed offshoring in the period 2014-2016. Second, difference-in-differences propensity score matching estimates reveal a negative effect of offshoring on domestic employment and production. Most of this negative effect is not because the offshoring firms shrink, but rather because they don’t grow as fast as the non-offshoring firms. We further decompose the underlying employment dynamics by using direct survey evidence on how many jobs the firms destroyed/created due to offshoring. Moreover, we do not find an effect on labour productivity, since the negative effect on domestic employment and production are more or less of the same size. Third, the German data confirm previous findings for Denmark that offshoring is associated with an increase in the share of ‘produced goods imports’, i.e. offshoring firms increase their imports for the same goods they continue to produce domestically. In contrast, it is not the case that offshoring firms increase the share of intermediate goods imports (a commonly used proxy for offshoring), as defined by the BEC Rev. 5 classification.

This paper analyzes how firm-specific forecast errors derived from survey data of German manufacturing firms over 2007–2011 relate to firms' investment propensity. Our findings reveal that asymmetries arise depending on the size and direction of the forecast error. The investment propensity declines if the realized situation is worse than expected. However, firms do not adjust investment if the realized situation is better than expected suggesting that the uncertainty component of the forecast error counteracts good surprises of unexpectedly favorable business conditions. This asymmetric mechanism can be one explanation behind slow recovery following crises.