In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the financial and legal system will need to deal with a surge of financial distress in the business sector. Some firms will be able to survive, while others will face bankruptcy and thus need to be liquidated or reorganized. Many surviving firms will need to...

This paper establishes a causal effect of competition from trade liberalization on various characteristics of organizational design. We exploit a unique panel dataset on firm hierarchies (1986-1999) of large U.S. firms and find that increasing competition leads firms to become flatter, i.e., (i)...

After the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a rapid and far-reaching shrinkage of international banks’ assets with a focus on foreign claims took place. For the largest 67 German banking groups, we find that both their characteristics and behavior in the pre-crisis episode had repercussions for the...