The literature on distressed firms has focused on these firms’ investment, capital structure, and labor decisions. This paper investigates a novel aspect of firm behavior in distress: how financial health affects a firm׳s lobbying and, consequently, its relationship with the government. We exploit the shock to nonfinancial firms during the 2008 financial crisis and the availability of the stimulus package in the first quarter of 2009. We find that firms with weaker financial health, as measured by credit default swap spreads, lobbied more. We also show that the amount spent on lobbying was associated with a greater likelihood of receiving stimulus funds.

We study how non-financial multinational companies propagate economic declines from their subsidiaries located in countries experiencing an economic downturn to subsidiaries in countries not experiencing one. We find that investment is 18% lower in subsidiaries of these parents relative to the same-industry, same-country subsidiaries of parents that are headquartered in the same parent country but do not have a subsidiary in a country experiencing an economic downturn. The employment growth rate in the affected subsidiaries is zero or negative while it is 1.4% in the subsidiaries of unaffected parents. The aggregate industry-level sales and employment are also negatively impacted in the countries of the affected subsidiaries.

Most empirical studies estimate the impact of fire sales either without the benefit of market prices from frequent trades, as with aircraft sales, or without observing transaction prices, as with the forced sales of equity securities by mutual funds facing outflows. We observe both by studying firms’ sales of minority equity stakes in publicly listed third parties. We estimate the distressed sale discount to be about 8% while controlling for liquidity and for industry, or about double the 4% estimated for equity sales by distressed mutual funds. The discount becomes 13–14% if the stake sold is more than 5% of the firm or is sold as a block. Prices recover after distressed sales.