We investigate whether employees in Germany benefit from public bank guarantees in terms of employment probability and wages. To that end, we exploit the removal of public bank guarantees in Germany in 2001 as a quasi-natural experiment. Our results show that bank guarantees lead to higher employment, but lower wage prospects for employees after working in affected establishments. Overall the results suggest that employees do not benefit from bank guarantees.

Abstract This paper examines the effect of dislocations in foreign currency (FX) swap markets ("CIP deviations") on bank lending. Using data from UK banks we show that when the cost of obtaining swap-based funds in a particular foreign currency increases, banks reduce the supply of cross-border credit in that currency. This effect is increasing in the degree of banks' reliance on swap-based FX funding. Access to foreign relatives matters as banks employ internal capital markets to shield their cross-border FX lending supply from the described channel. Partial substitution occurs from banks outside the UK not affected by changes in synthetic funding costs.

We study the effect of judicial bias favoring firm continuation in bankruptcy on the labor market outcomes of employees by exploiting the random assignment of cases across courts in the State of São Paulo in Brazil. Employees of firms assigned to courts that favor firm continuation are more likely to stay with their employer, but they earn, on average, lower wages three to five years after bankruptcy. We discuss several potential mechanisms that can rationalize this result, and provide evidence that imperfect information about outside options in the local labor market and adjustment costs associated with job change play an important role.

We examine the effect of sovereign credit impairments on the pricing of syndicated loans following rating downgrades in the borrowing firms' countries of domicile. We find that the sovereign ceiling policies used by credit rating agencies create a disproportionately adverse impact on the bounded firms' borrowing costs relative to other domestic firms following their sovereign's rating downgrade. Rating-based regulatory frictions partially explain our results. On the supply-side, loans carry a higher spread when granted from low-capital banks, non-bank lenders, and banks with high market power. We further document an operating demand-side channel, contingent on borrowers' size, financial constraints, and global diversification. Our results can be attributed to the relative bargaining power between lenders and borrowers: relationship borrowers and non-bank dependent borrowers with alternative financing sources are much less affected.