We exploit the staggered introduction of liability waivers when investors hold stakes in conflicting business opportunities as a shock to venture capital (VC) investment and director networks. After the law changes, we find increases in within-industry VC investment and common directors serving on startup boards. Despite the potential for rent extraction, same-industry startups inside VC portfolios benefit by raising more capital, failing less, and exiting more successfully. VC directors serving on other startup boards are the primary mechanism associated with positive outcomes, consistent with common VC investment facilitating informational exchanges in VC portfolios.

How durable are the political accountability effects of the worst pandemic in a century? We track the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on political preferences through its “high” and “low” phases in the Czech Republic. Uniquely, we ask about the effects of both the health and the economic costs of the pandemic measured at both personal and municipality levels. Consistent with the literature, we estimate effects suggestive of political accountability of leaders during “high” pandemic phases without higher support for non-democratic alternatives. However, we also find that the pandemic political accountability effects are mostly short-lived, and do not extend to the first post-pandemic elections.

Finding the proper balance between state and market is challenging. Especially in banking (Stiglitz, 1993). Banks in their function as financial intermediaries are risky and inherently prone to failure (Diamond and Dybvig, 1983; Diamond, 1984). But they provide services of vital importance to the economy in the form of payment services, credit supply for investments, inter-temporal liquidity transformation, or management of savings accounts. Consequently, the stability of the banking and financial sector is of public interest. In the least, the financial crisis was an unpleasant reminder to the industrialized world about the severe repercussions of unstable banking systems.

Economic growth is the core topic for both economic researchers and economic policy makers. Thereby two questions are regarded as central: What are the factors that establish high growth? And how can sustainable growth, i.e. the avoidance of severe fluctuations, be achieved? Indeed, basically all areas of economics, from finance to labor economics, from development economics to industrial organization, from competition economics to environmental economics aim to achieve knowledge that directly (or indirectly) helps to understand and create growth that is both sufficient and sustainable.

Firm training is widely regarded as crucial for protecting workers from automation, yet there is a lack of empirical evidence to support this belief. Using internationally harmonized data from over 90,000 workers across 37 industrialized countries, we construct an individual-level measure of automation risk based on tasks performed at work. Our analysis reveals substantial within-occupation variation in automation risk, overlooked by existing occupation-level measures. To assess whether firm training mitigates automation risk, we exploit within-occupation and within-industry variation. Additionally, we employ entropy balancing to re-weight workers without firm training based on a rich set of background characteristics, including tested numeracy skills as a proxy for unobserved ability. We find that training reduces workers’ automation risk by 3.8 percentage points, equivalent to 8% of the average automation risk. The training-induced reduction in automation risk accounts for 15% of the wage returns to firm training. Firm training is effective in reducing automation risk and increasing wages across nearly all countries, underscoring the external validity of our findings. Training is similarly effective across gender, age, and education groups, suggesting widely shared benefits rather than gains concentrated in specific demographic segments.