How does finance affect employment and inter-industry job reallocation? We present a model that predicts that financial development (i) increases employment and/or labour productivity and wages, with a smaller impact at high levels of the equilibrium wage and financial development; (ii) may induce either more or less reallocation of jobs depending on whether shocks to profit opportunities or to cash flow predominate; (iii) amplifies the output and employment losses in cri-ses, firms that rely most on banks for liquidity being hit the hardest. Testing these predictions on international industry-level data for 1970–2003, we find that standard measures of financial development are indeed associated with greater employment growth, although only in non-OECD countries, and are not correlated with labour productivity or real wage growth. Moreover, they correlate negatively with inter-industry dispersion of employment growth. Finally, there is some evidence of a ‘dark side ’ of financial development, in that during banking crises employment grows less in the industries that are more dependent on ex-ternal finance and those located in the more financially developed countries.

We present a model in which the owner of the firm enjoys a private benefit from developing a personal relationship with the executives. This may lead the owner to re-tain a senior executive in office even though a more productive replacement is available. The model shows that the private returns of the employment relationship distort exec-utive selection, reducing the executives ’ average ability and the firm productivity. We estimate the structural parameters of the model using a panel of Italian firms with in-formation on the nature of the controlling shareholder, matched with individual records of their executives. These estimates are used to quantify the relevance of private returns and the related productivity gap across firms characterized by four different types of ownership: government, family, conglomerate and foreign. We find that private returns are large in family and government controlled firms, while smaller with other ownership types. The resulting distortion in executive selection can account for TFP differentials between control types of about 10%. The structural estimates are fully consistent with a set of model-based OLS regressions, even though the sample moments used by the two approaches are different.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. We study how financial frictions affect firm-level heterogeneity and trade. We build a model where productivity differences across monopolistically competitive firms are endogenous and depend on investment decisions at the entry stage. By increasing entry costs, financial frictions lower the exit cutoff and hence the value of investing in bigger projects with more dispersed outcomes. As a result, credit frictions make firms smaller and more homogeneous, and hinder the volume of exports. Export opportunities, instead, shift expected profits to the tail and increase the value of technological heterogeneity. We test these predictions using comparable measures of sales dispersion within 365 manufacturing industries in 119 countries, built from highly disaggregated US import data. Consistent with the model, financial development increases sales dispersion, especially in more financially vulnerable industries; sales dispersion is also increasing in measures of comparative advantage. These results can be important for explaining the effect of financial development and factor endowments on export sales. Terms of use: Documents in JEL-Codes: F120, F140.