Firms adjust their employment to changes in output. But they tend to adjust it only partially. Typically, labor is hoarded in downturns and subsequently firms have to hire less in upturns. Investment in labor hoarding may therefore be influenced by factors that impede investments, such as...

This paper analyzes how the size and composition of the balance sheet affects firms financing cost within a large panel of Swiss firms in the non-financial sector from 1998 to 2011. The data includes a large number of small firms, which makes the data representative. We use an instrumental...

Firms adjust their employment to changes in output. But they tend to adjust it only partially. Typically, labor is hoarded in downturns and subsequently firms have to hire less in upturns. Investment in labor hoarding may therefore be influenced by factors that impede investments, such as...

Based on a large panel of balance sheets and income statements of Swiss nonfinancial firms from 1998 to 2016, we estimate the sensitivity of the cost of external finance to firm net worth using exogenous variation in net worth. We find that firm net worth is inversely related to the external...