Drawing on firm-level forecasts at a one-year horizon in the Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU), we construct novel, forward-looking reallocation measures for jobs and sales. These measures rise sharply after February 2020, reaching rates in April that are 2.4 (3.9) times the pre-COVID average...

In this paper, I examine the effects of a firm’s prior reputation in enforcing good CSR practices on its involuntary turnover behavior during the first year of the COVID ’19 pandemic. Specifically, using difference-in-difference analysis on 3,011 publicly traded US firms over the period...

Differential enforcement of employment protection by explicit design of the legislation, for example through exemptions for small firms, has been exploited in a growing body of research. However, little is known about the effects of differential enforcement that is not defined by the letter of...

Differential enforcement of employment protection by explicit design of the legislation, for example, through exemptions for small firms, has been exploited in a growing body of research. However, little is known about the effects of differential enforcement that is not defined by the letter of...

This paper explores, both theoretically and empirically, how firing costs affect worker productivity and turnover. We develop a model in which workers are essential to knowledge transfer between firms and worker effort is firm-specific in the sense that a worker can be fired before reaping the...

We collect rich establishment-level data about advance layoff notices filed under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act since January 1990. We present in-sample evidence that the number of workers affected by WARN notices leads state-level initial unemployment insurance...

I exploit the adoption of state-level labor protection laws as an exogenous increase in employee firing costs to examine how the costs associated with discharging workers affect capital structure decisions. I find that firms reduce debt ratios following the adoption of these laws, with this...