How resilient are high-skilled, white-collar workers? We address this question by exploiting a uniquely comprehensive dataset of individual-level resumes of bank employees and the setting of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. The results reveal that the disruption had no effect on long-term career trajectories, except for senior employees. By 2019, former Lehman Brothers employees were 2% more likely to have experienced a break from employment and 2.5% more likely to have left the financial services industry than employees at other multinational investment banks—but these effects are driven exclusively by senior individuals, such as managing directors, and routine workers, such as secretaries. Analysts and associates experienced no adverse effects. Furthermore, in terms of subsequent career growth, analysts and associates from Lehman Brothers fared no worse than their counterparts at non-disrupted banks in terms of both (i) achieving high-ranking positions and (ii) the compensation of these subsequent positions. These results contrast with the extensive evidence of large, persistent negative effects of displacement on blue-collar workers, highlighting a novel aspect of income-related inequality.

Women are less likely than men to start firms and female entrepreneurs are less likely to succeed. This paper studies the effect of childbirth on women’s entrepreneurial activity. Drawing on rich administrative data from Canada and using

an event study and instrumental variable design, I show that childbirth has substantial negative effects on women’s founding rates and start-up performance, accounting for a large portion of the gender gap in entrepreneurship. The effects are

permanent: entrepreneurial outcomes never recover to their pre-birth levels. These

results are not fully explained by household specialization based on labor market

advantage. Childcare availability and progressive gender norms reduce the adverse

effect of childbirth on the entrepreneurship gap.

We investigate the compensation policies of family and non-family firms using a novel employer-employee matched dataset, comprising the universe of Italian incorporated companies combined with information on their shareholders. Family firms pay significantly lower wages and offer slower careers. Half of their wage gap is accounted for by workers' time invariant characteristics, while the rest cannot be explained by differences in productivity or in non-monetary compensating differentials. The evidence is consistent with a model where family owners protect their control over the firm by creating a "glass ceiling" that limits workers' career progression, thus hindering their human capital accumulation.