“Lehman’s Lemons: Do Career Disruptions Matter for the Top 5%?”, Anastassia Fedyk, James Hodson2021-04-04 (economics; backlinks; similar)⁠:

How resilient are high-skilled, white collar workers? We exploit an uniquely comprehensive dataset of individual-level resumes of bank employees and the setting of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy to estimate the effect of an unanticipated shock on the career paths of mobile and high skilled labor.

We find evidence of short-term effects that largely dissipate over the course of the decade and that touch only the senior-most employees. We match each employee of Lehman Brothers in January 2008 to the most similar employees at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and UBS based on job positions, skills, education, and demographics. By 2019, the former Lehman Brothers employees are 2% more likely to have experienced at least a 6-months-long break from reported employment and 3% more likely to have left the financial services industry. However, these effects concentrate among the senior individuals such as vice presidents and managing directors and are absent for junior employees such as analysts and associates.

Furthermore, in terms of subsequent career growth, junior employees of Lehman Brothers fare no worse than their counterparts at the other banks. Analysts and associates employed at Lehman Brothers in January 2008 have equal or greater likelihoods of achieving senior roles such as managing director in existing enterprises by January 2019 and are more likely to found their own businesses.

[Keywords: career disruptions, bankruptcy, human capital, skilled labor, inequality]

…Our last result suggests that former employees of Lehman Brothers were prone to use the disruption event as a platform to start new ventures, consistent with the evidence by Babina2020 and Hacamo & Kleiner2020. We identify entrepreneurial activity as individuals who are listed as (co-)founders, presidents, or C-level executives of firms that did not exist prior to the bankruptcy event. The unconditional likelihood of entrepreneurship among the employees of the control banks is 2.16%. This likelihood is much higher among former employees of Lehman Brothers, at 3.29%, with the difference statistically-significant at the 1% level. Across hierarchical levels, baseline entrepreneurship is higher for more senior employees (eg. 3.7% for managing directors and 4.1% for senior management), but the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy increases this rate for all positions. In fact, the starkest relative increase is observed for employees who held associate-level titles in January 2008, with ex-Lehman associates showing a 4.5% likelihood of subsequently founding their own ventures, compared to only 1.8% for associates at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and UBS.

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