We examine how firms adapt their organization when they go public. To conform with the requirements of public capital markets, we expect IPO firms to become more organized, making the firm more accountable and its human capital more easily replaceable. We find that IPO firms transform into a more hierarchical organization with smaller departments. Managerial oversight increases. Organizational functions dedicated to accounting, finance, information and communication, and human resources become much more prominent. Employee turnover is sizeable and directly related to changes in hierarchical layers. New hires are better educated, but younger and less experienced than incumbents, which reflects the staffing needs of a more hierarchical organization. Wage inequality increases as firms become more hierarchical. Overall, going public is associated with a comprehensive transformation of the firm's organization which becomes geared towards efficiently operating a public firm.

We investigate the predictive power of loan spreads for forecasting business cycles, specifically focusing on more constrained, intermediary-reliant firms. We introduce a novel loan-market-based credit spread constructed using secondary corporate loan-market prices over the 1999 to 2023 period. Loan spreads significantly enhance the prediction of macroeconomic outcomes, outperforming other credit-spread indicators. We also explore the underlying mechanisms and differentiate between borrower fundamentals and financial frictions. Evidence suggests that supply-side frictions are a decisive factor in the forecasting ability of loan spreads.

We document and dissect a new stylized fact about firm growth: the shift from labor to intermediate inputs. This shift occurs in input quantities, cost and output shares, and output elasticities. We establish this fact using German firm-level data and replicate it in administrative firm data from 11 additional countries. We also document these patterns in micro-aggregated industry data for 20 European countries (and, with respect to industry cost shares, for the US). We rationalize this novel regularity within a parsimonious model featuring (i) an elasticity of substitution between intermediates and labor that exceeds unity, and (ii) an increasing shadow price of labor relative to intermediates, due to monopsony power over labor or labor adjustment costs. The shift from labor to intermediates accounts for one half to one third of the decline in the labor share in growing firms (the remainder is due to wage markdowns and markups) and rationalizes most of the labor share decline in growing industries.

We document and dissect a new stylized fact about firm growth: the shift from labor to intermediate inputs. This shift occurs in input quantities, cost and output shares, and output elasticities. We establish this fact using German firm-level data and replicate it in administrative firm data from 11 additional countries. We also document these patterns in micro-aggregated industry data for 20 European countries (and, with respect to industry cost shares, for the US). We rationalize this novel regularity within a parsimonious model featuring (i) an elasticity of substitution between intermediates and labor that exceeds unity, and (ii) an increasing shadow price of labor relative to intermediates, due to monopsony power over labor or labor adjustment costs. The shift from labor to intermediates accounts for one half to one third of the decline in the labor share in growing firms (the remainder is due to wage markdowns and markups) and rationalizes most of the labor share decline in growing industries.

We compare the effects of external financing shocks on patient mortality at nonprofit and for-profit hospitals. Using confidential patient-level data, we find that patient mortality increases to a lesser extent at nonprofit hospitals than at for-profit ones facing exogenous, negative shocks to debt capacity. Such an effect is not driven by patient characteristics or their choices of hospitals. It is concentrated among patients without private insurance and patients with higher-risk diagnoses. Potential economic mechanisms include nonprofit hospitals' having deeper cash reserves and greater ability to maintain spending on medical staff and equipment, even at the expense of lower profitability. Overall, our evidence suggests that nonprofit organizations can better serve social interests during financially challenging times.

This study examines how antitrust law adoptions affect horizontal merger and acquisition (M&A) outcomes. Using the staggered introduction of competition laws in 20 countries, we find antitrust regulation decreases acquirers’ five-day cumulative abnormal returns surrounding horizontal merger announcements. A decrease in deal value, target book assets, and industry peers' announcement returns are consistent with the market power hypothesis. Exploiting antitrust law adoptions addresses a downward bias to an estimated effect of antitrust enforcement (Baker (2003)). The potential bias from heterogeneous treatment effects does not nullify our results. Overall, antitrust policies seem to deter post-merger monopolistic gains, potentially improving customer welfare.