We study how the human capital embedded in teams is reallocated in corporate bankruptcies using data on US inventors. We find that bankruptcies reduce team stability. After a bankruptcy, team-dependent inventors produce fewer and less impactful patents. This points to the loss of team-specific...

The importance of skilled labor and the inalienability of human capital expose firms to the risk of losing talent in critical times. Using Swedish micro-data, we document that firms lose workers with the highest cognitive and noncognitive skills as they approach bankruptcy. In a...