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- April 21, 2023
- Article
When Scenario Planning Fails
By: Kalle Heikkinen, William R. Kerr, Mika Malin, Panu Routila and Eemil Rupponen
How can organizations perform scenario planning when they are hit by shocks outside of leaders’ field of vision? Interviews with Nordic executives, who experienced both the Covid-19 pandemic and were in close proximity to Russia as the country invaded Ukraine, can...
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- September 2022
- Article
Find and Replace: R&D Investment Following the Erosion of Existing Products
By: Joshua L. Krieger, Xuelin Li and Richard T. Thakor
How do innovative firms react when existing products experience negative shocks? We explore this question with detailed project-level data from drug development firms. Using FDA Public Health Advisories as idiosyncratic negative shocks to approved drugs, we first...
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- July 2022
- Article
The Pass-Through of Uncertainty Shocks to Households
By: Marco Di Maggio, Amir Kermani, Rodney Ramcharan, Vincent Yao and Edison Yu
Using new employer-employee matched data, this paper investigates the impact of uncertainty, as measured by idiosyncratic stock market volatility, on individual outcomes. We find that firms provide at best partial insurance to their workers. An increase in firm-level...
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Keywords:
Employment Risk;
Consumption;
Employment;
Risk and Uncertainty;
System Shocks;
Insurance;
Household;
Spending
- 2022
- Working Paper
Stock Market Stimulus
By: Robin Greenwood, Toomas Laarits and Jeffrey Wurgler
We study the stock market effects of the arrival of the three rounds of “stimulus checks” to U.S. taxpayers and the single round of direct payments to Hong Kong citizens. The first two rounds of U.S. checks appear to have increased retail buying and share prices of...
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Keywords:
Stock Market;
COVID-19 Pandemic;
Fiscal Stimulus;
Stimulus Payments;
Impact;
Stocks;
System Shocks;
Price;
Spending;
United States;
Hong Kong;
China
- 2022
- Chapter
Crises and International Business
By: Geoffrey Jones
This chapter uses the intellectual journey of the author to suggest that crises have been the norm rather than the exception in the history of international business. Over the last 100 years world wars, regional conflicts, the Great Depression, and decolonization are...
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- December 2021
- Article
India's Food Supply Chain during the Pandemic
By: Matt Lowe, G.V. Nadhanael and Benjamin N. Roth
We document the impact of India’s COVID-19 lockdown on the food supply chain. Food arrivals in wholesale markets dropped by 69% in the three weeks following the lockdown and wholesale prices rose by 8%. Six weeks after the lockdown began, volumes and prices had fully...
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Keywords:
COVID-19;
Supply Chain;
Health Pandemics;
Food;
Policy;
System Shocks;
Food and Beverage Industry;
India
- 2022
- Working Paper
Transitory and Permanent Cash Flow Shocks in Debt Contract Design
By: Le Ma, Anywhere Sikochi and Yajun Xiao
We examine how lenders design contracts when borrowers are exposed to volatile transitory or permanent cash flow shocks. We find that volatile transitory shocks are associated with fewer liquidity covenants, indicating financial flexibility that can enable firms to...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Financial Flexibility and Corporate Employment
By: Rebecca Lester, Ethan Rouen and Braden Williams
We study the role of financial flexibility on COVID-19 employment actions. Using daily data from March through May 2020 for 354 of the largest U.S. employers, we find that firms facing a negative demand shock were 28.8 percentage points more likely to reduce their...
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Keywords:
Financial Flexibility;
COVID-19;
Pandemic;
Employment;
Health Pandemics;
System Shocks;
Finance
- March 2021
- Article
On the Direct and Indirect Real Effects of Credit Supply Shocks
By: Laura Alfaro, Manuel García-Santana and Enrique Moral-Benito
We explore the real effects of bank-lending shocks and how they permeate the economy through buyer-supplier linkages. We combine administrative data on all Spanish firms with a matched bank-firm-loan dataset of all corporate loans from 2003 to 2013 to estimate...
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- February 2021
- Article
Do Household Wealth Shocks Affect Productivity? Evidence from Innovative Workers During the Great Recession
By: S. Bernstein, T. McQuade and R. Townsend
We investigate how the deterioration of household balance sheets affects worker productivity, and, in turn, economic downturns. Specifically, we compare the output of innovative workers who experienced differential declines in housing wealth during the financial crisis...
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- January 2021
- Article
Turbulence, Firm Decentralization and Growth in Bad Times
By: Philippe Aghion, Nicholas Bloom, Brian Lucking, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
What is the optimal form of firm organization during “bad times”? We present a model of delegation within the firm to show that the effect is ambiguous. The greater turbulence following macro shocks may benefit decentralized firms because the value of local information...
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- November 2020 (Revised March 2023)
- Teaching Note
Unrest in Chile
By: Vincent Pons, John Masko, Rafael Di Tella and William Mullins
In 2020, Chileans would head to the ballot box to decide their country’s future. Many international observers credited Chile’s decades of neoliberal governance with turning the country into Latin America’s “Tiger,” a prosperous, diversified economy on its way to...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
An Executive Order Worth $100 Billion: The Impact of an Immigration Ban's Announcement on Fortune 500 Firms' Valuation
By: Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Britta Glennon
On June 22, 2020, President Trump issued an Executive Order (EO) that suspended new work visas, barring nearly 200,000 foreign workers and their dependents from entering the United States and preventing American companies from hiring skilled immigrants using H-1B or L1...
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Keywords:
Visa;
Foreign Workers;
Fortune 500;
Immigration;
Policy;
System Shocks;
Business Ventures;
Valuation
- Fall 2020
- Article
Sizing Up Corporate Restructuring in the COVID Crisis
By: Robin Greenwood, Benjamin Iverson and David Thesmar
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the financial and legal system will need to deal with a surge of financial distress in the business sector. Some firms will be able to survive, while others will face bankruptcy and thus need to be liquidated or reorganized. Many...
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- Summer 2020
- Article
Is It Time to Rethink Globalized Supply Chains?: The COVID-19 Pandemic Should Be a Wake-up Call for Managers and Prompt Them to Consider Actions That Will Improve Their Resilience to Future Shocks
By: Willy C. Shih
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the complex interdependencies of globalized supply chains. While these global multistage production networks had spread during a relatively benign environment of falling trade barriers and increasing interdependencies among countries,...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
EMEs and COVID-19: Shutting Down in a World of Informal and Tiny Firms
By: Laura Alfaro, Oscar Becerra and Marcela Eslava
Emerging economies are characterized by an extremely high prevalence of informality, small-firm employment and jobs not fit for working from home. These features factor into how the COVID-19 crisis has affected the economy. We develop a framework that, based on...
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- April 2020 (Revised July 2020)
- Case
Unrest in Chile
By: Vincent Pons, William Mullins, John Masko, Annelena Lobb and Rafael Di Tella
In 2020, Chileans would head to the ballot box to decide their country’s future. Many international observers credited Chile’s decades of neoliberal governance with turning the country into Latin America’s “Tiger,” a prosperous, diversified economy on its way to...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Local Shocks and Internal Migration: The Disparate Effects of Robots and Chinese Imports in the U.S.
By: Marius Faber, Andres Sarto and Marco Tabellini
Do local labor markets adjust to economic shocks through migration? In this paper, we study this question by focusing on two of the most important shocks that hit U.S. manufacturing since the 1990s: Chinese import competition and the introduction of industrial robots....
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- 2019
- Article
More Amazon Effects: Online Competition and Pricing Behaviors
By: Alberto Cavallo
I study how online competition, with its shrinking margins, algorithmic pricing technologies, and the transparency of the web, can change the pricing behavior of large retailers in the U.S. and affect aggregate inflation dynamics. In particular, I show that in the past...
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- May 2019
- Article
Corporate Debt, Firm Size and Financial Fragility in Emerging Markets
By: Laura Alfaro, Gonzalo Asis, Anusha Chari and Ugo Panizza
The post-Global Financial Crisis period shows a surge in corporate leverage in emerging markets and a number of countries with deteriorated corporate financial fragility indicators (Altman’s Z-score). Firm size plays a critical role in the relationship between...
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