Corporate leverage and employees’ rights in bankruptcy

Corporate leverage responds differently to employees’ rights in bankruptcy depending on whether it is driven by strategic concerns in wage bargaining or by credit constraints. Using novel data on employees’ rights in bankruptcy, we estimate their impact on leverage, exploiting time-series, cross-cou...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ellul, A. (Author), Pagano, M. (Author)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier B.V. 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:View Fulltext in Publisher
LEADER 01375nam a2200205Ia 4500
001 10.1016-j.jfineco.2019.05.002
008 220511s2019 CNT 000 0 und d
020 |a 0304405X (ISSN) 
245 1 0 |a Corporate leverage and employees’ rights in bankruptcy 
260 0 |b Elsevier B.V.  |c 2019 
856 |z View Fulltext in Publisher  |u https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2019.05.002 
520 3 |a Corporate leverage responds differently to employees’ rights in bankruptcy depending on whether it is driven by strategic concerns in wage bargaining or by credit constraints. Using novel data on employees’ rights in bankruptcy, we estimate their impact on leverage, exploiting time-series, cross-country, and firm-level variation in the data. For financially unconstrained firms, results accord with the strategic debt model: leverage increases more in response to rises in corporate property values or profitability if employees have strong seniority in liquidation and weak rights in restructuring. Instead, in financially constrained firms leverage responds less to these shocks if employees have stronger seniority. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. 
650 0 4 |a Bankruptcy 
650 0 4 |a Leverage 
650 0 4 |a Seniority 
650 0 4 |a Wage bargaining 
650 0 4 |a Workers’ rights 
700 1 |a Ellul, A.  |e author 
700 1 |a Pagano, M.  |e author 
773 |t Journal of Financial Economics