Essays on corporate finance: insights on the interactions of credit and labor markets

The goal of this project is to analyze the effect of banks’ credit supply on employment and workforce composition; i.e., on firms’ decisions to employ blue vs. white collar workers, to train their staff, or to offer long- vs. short-term contracts. We propose to estimate this effect for the Belgian economy, and to characterize heterogeneity across a variety of bank, firm, and job characteristics. Conditions in Belgium further enable us to analyze the sensitivity of our results to changes in firing costs, and their interaction with local labour supply shocks.