Firm financing and the relative demand for labor and capital

Abstract

Using more than one million firm-year observations of small and medium European firms between 2003 and 2019, this paper introduces new stylized facts on how firms' relative demand for labor and capital evolved as their capital structure adjusted to the events of the 2008 crisis. It also provides micro-level evidence that firms substitute capital for labor when financing costs rise. The empirical evidence lends support to the hypothesis that substitution is driven by an incentive to raise holdings of collateralizable capital. Identification of exogenous variations in firm financing costs relies on the heterogeneous effects of ECB monetary policy surprises on financing costs across the firm distribution.