Firm Resources, Strategies, and Survival and Growth During COVID-19: Evidence From Two-Wave Global Surveys

This study examines how firms have made strategic choices and performed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on the organizational resources and strategic change literature, it uses World Bank Enterprise Surveys and the COVID-19 Follow-up Enterprise Surveys to examine how different endowments in organizational resources affected firm performance as measured by their survival status and sales growth, and how these resources interact with and affect strategic responses in the supply of inputs, response to changing demand, liquidity management, and innovation. The results indicate that larger firms, firms with foreign or state ownership, and subsidiary companies performed better during the pandemic by more effectively stabilizing supply, managing liquidity, and fostering new product development. Chief executive officers with longer tenure improved survival rates. Firms in richer countries have coped with the pandemic better and stringent government COVID-19 control policies have tended to hurt firms\u27 performance

Has Training Helped Employ Xiagang in China? A Tale from Two Cities.

Valuable contributions to the design of this study were made by Tamar Manuelyan Atinc, Wang Wei of the World Bank resident mission in Beijing, Chai Zhijian of the Chinese Ministry of Labor, Mr. Yu of the Chinese Labor Research Institute, and Li Huiming of the State Statistical Bureau. The expertise, resources, and courtesy of the municipal labor bureaus in Wuhan and Shenyang also contributed greatly to the successful completion of this design. Jeffrey Smith of the University of Maryland helped guide the evaluation. Superb research assistance was This study evaluates the effectiveness of training programs for workers retrenched from Chinese state-owned enterprises in the cities of Shenyang and Wuhan. A variety of impact estimators were applied, however ordinary least squares (OLS) controlling for observable characteristics was robust. We find that training dampens reemployment prospects in Shenyang but improves them in Wuhan. Training impact estimates computed by propensity score and logodds ratio matching imposing various support condition rules, yielded estimates very similar to those from the OLS. The estimates suggest that participation in training reduces the probability of being employed one year after participation by about 6 percentage points in Shenyang, bu