The wage-bill firm subsample matches the full company universe on size

Evidence

For a subset of 386 out of our 5,610 joint stock companies, information on company wage bills in 1929 and 1934 is available. In Figure 4, panel B we show that the subset of companies reporting their wage bill is similar in terms of assets to the full sample: the distribution of log(assets) for the sample of enterprises that report their wage bill in 1929 (386 observations) largely overlaps with that for the universe of joint stock companies in 1929 (5,610 observations). The difference in means is insignificant. This suggests that our subsample of companies with wage bill information resembles −in size −the average joint stock company. — Sebastian Doerr et al., Financial Crises and Political…, 131