Coping with COVID-19: Does Management make Firms More Resilient?

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Place, Productivity, and Prosperity: Revisiting Spatially Targeted Policies for Regional Development

“…There are both larger private returns to entrepreneurial education (in the form of profits) and possibly also social returns through external spillovers (Gennaioli et al 2013). The emerging literature on managerial quality (Bloom and Van Reenen 2007;Bloom et al 2013;Maloney and Sarrias 2017;Grover and Karplus 2021) clearly stresses the importance of sound basic business strategies and human relations policies, but also the ability to view a longer horizon and to cope with crises. The Innovation Paradox (Ciera and Maloney 2017) and High-Growth Firms (Grover, Medvedev, and Olafsen 2018) emphasize the need for building managerial capabilities as a critical complement to innovation and hence a strategy for generating healthy firm dynamics.…”

Innovation to Immune: Empirical Evidence From COVID-19 Focused Enterprise Surveys

“…During this recent COVID-19 crisis, firms faced difficulties in performing their operational activities, severe liquidity constraints, and, ultimately, risk of failure ( Apedo-Amah et al, 2020 ; Bartik et al, 2020 ; Dai et al, 2020b ). The rapidly growing literature on COVID-19 sheds initial light on firm-specific characteristics that have enabled firms to cope with and survive the shock ( Ding et al, 2020 ; Guo et al, 2020 ; Li et al, 2020 ; Grover and Karplus, 2021 ) but thus far none has focused on innovation practices. Therefore, consistent with this stream of literature, the main purpose of our study is to highlight the importance of innovation practices as a response to the COVID-19 crisis and its effect on business performance and the likelihood of their survival.…”

“…Some businesses are in a better position to cope with the recession than others. For instance, Grover and Karplus (2021) notes that firms with structured management practices are more resilient to the downside impacts of the COVID-19 crisis. Li et al (2020) finds that firms with a strong corporate culture outperform their counterparts without strong culture amid the COVID-19 crisis.…”

Productivity and Firm Exit during the COVID-19 Crisis: Cross-Country Evidence

“…Nonetheless, in order to account for the potential concerns raised when using the assumed exit measure, robustness checks are conducted by using the confirmed exit variable. It is worth notice that, unlike previous papers on firms' survival during COVID-19 (Grover and Karplus, 2021;Liu, et al, 2021a, Liu et al 2021b, and Wagner, 2021 this paper does not include among "exiters" firms that temporarily interrupted operations due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Focusing on temporary closures might generate confounding effects as in most cases, temporary closures were mandated by local or national governments to curb the transmission of the disease and are not necessarily linked to productivity.…”