Corporate Leverage and Employees’ Rights in Bankruptcy
72 Pages Posted: 18 Apr 2017 Last revised: 29 Mar 2019
Date Written: March 16, 2019
Abstract
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.
Keywords: workers’ rights, bankruptcy, seniority, leverage, wage bargaining
JEL Classification: G31, G32, G38, H25, H26, M40
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation