TY - JOUR
T1 - Talent in distressed firms
T2 - Investigating the labor costs of financial distress
AU - Baghai, Ramin P.
AU - Silva, Rui C.
AU - Thell, Viktor
AU - Vig, Vikrant
N1 - Funding Information:
Ramin P. Baghai is with the Stockholm School of Economics. Rui C. Silva is with the Nova School of Business and Economics. Viktor Thell is with Finansinspektionen (Sweden's financial supervisory authority). Vikrant Vig is with the London Business School and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. We thank the Editor (Stefan Nagel), two anonymous referees, Ashwini Agrawal, Xavier Giroud, David Matsa, Gordon Philips, Fabiano Schivardi, Amit Seru, Henri Servaes, Elena Simintzi, Martin Strieborny, Geoffrey Tate, Luigi Zingales, and seminar and conference participants at the CSEF‐EIEF‐SITE conference on Labor and Finance (2015), Finance, Organizations and Markets Conference (2015), Spanish Economic Association meetings (2015), SHOF PhD conference (2015), SFS Finance Cavalcade (2016), 13th Annual Conference in Financial Economics Research—IDC, Israel (2016), EFA (2016), Adam Smith Workshops (2017), UNC/Duke Corporate Finance Conference (2017), NBER Corporate Finance Summer Institute (2017), Banco de Mexico, Bocconi University, Faculdade de Economia do Porto, London Business School, Lund University School of Economics and Management, Southampton Business School, Stockholm School of Economics (Swedish House of Finance), and University of Texas at Dallas. We thank Johan Wall at Statistics Sweden for his help with the administrative data. We are grateful for financial support from the Deloitte Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Research and Materials Development Fund at the London Business School, and the Hans Dalborg foundation. Thell gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Swedish Bank Research Foundation, as well as the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation. This project has also received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 679747). We have read disclosure policy and have no conflicts of interest to disclose. The Journal of Finance
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. The Journal of Finance published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Finance Association
PY - 2021/12
Y1 - 2021/12
N2 - The importance of skilled labor and the inalienability of human capital expose firms to the risk of losing talent at critical times. Using Swedish microdata, we document that firms lose workers with the highest cognitive and noncognitive skills as they approach bankruptcy. In a quasi-experiment, we confirm that financial distress drives these results: following a negative export shock caused by exogenous currency movements, talent abandons the firm, but only if the exporter is highly leveraged. Consistent with talent dependence being associated with higher labor costs of financial distress, firms that rely more on talent have more conservative capital structures.
AB - The importance of skilled labor and the inalienability of human capital expose firms to the risk of losing talent at critical times. Using Swedish microdata, we document that firms lose workers with the highest cognitive and noncognitive skills as they approach bankruptcy. In a quasi-experiment, we confirm that financial distress drives these results: following a negative export shock caused by exogenous currency movements, talent abandons the firm, but only if the exporter is highly leveraged. Consistent with talent dependence being associated with higher labor costs of financial distress, firms that rely more on talent have more conservative capital structures.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85117131448&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/jofi.13077
DO - 10.1111/jofi.13077
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85117131448
SN - 0022-1082
VL - 76
SP - 2907
EP - 2961
JO - The Journal of Finance
JF - The Journal of Finance
IS - 6
ER -