resilience and recovery of firms during the 2009 global financial crisis was closely associated with access to credit and trade finance (Ahn et al., 2011; Amiti and Weinstein, 2011; Chor and Manova, 2012; Crozet et al., 2022).

Our paper also contributes to the literature that supports the benefits of remote work. In a metaanalysis of empirical studies on the topic, Martin and MacDonnell (2012) find a positive relationship between telework and organizational outcomes, including productivity, retention, organizational commitment, and performance within the organization. In a randomized controlled trial of 1,612 graduate engineers, marketing and finance employees in a large technology firm in China, Bloom et al. (2022) find that hybrid WfH has reduced attrition by 33% and improved job satisfaction measures. Using earlier experimental data for the same large technology firm in China, Bloom et al. (2015) find that home-based work led to an increase in performance by 13 percent, of which about 9 percent was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick-days) and 4 percent from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter working environment). Using data from over 200 million U.S. job postings, Bai et al. (2020) find that firms with high pre-pandemic WFH feasibility had significantly higher sales, net incomes, and stock returns than their peers during the pandemic.

Lastly, our paper contributes to the literature that analyzes the uneven impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the private sector, with persistent negative consequences for specific types of countries, sectors and firms. For example, the heterogeneous effects observed are based on certain country characteristics such as income, region, severity of lockdown and feasibility to work remotely (Dingel and Neiman, 2020; de Lucio et al., 2020) or sector attributes such as contract intensity, amenability to remote work, GVC intensity, intensity of durable products in output, dependence on external finance, reliance on letters of credit, product skill labor intensity and product complexity (Bas et al., 2022; Constantinescu et al., 2022; Crozet et al., 2022; Espitia et al., 2021). Among firm characteristics that matter, some are external attributes, such as size (Bricongne et al., 2012; Cirera et al., 021a), global engagement (Constantinescu et al., 2022; de Lucio et al., 2022), and intensity of GVC participation (Constantinescu et al., 2022; Borino et al., 2021; Brucal et al., 2021; de Lucio et al., 2022; Hyun et al., 2020), while others are internal traits such as management capabilities (Grover and Karplus, 2021; Hyun et al., 2020; Brucal et al., 2021; Borino et al., 2021) and pre-crisis digital readiness (Cirera et al., 2022; Constantinescu et al., 2022).

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the data. Section 3 specifies the empirical strategy. Section 4 presents the results. Section 5 concludes.

# **2. Data and Descriptive Statistics**

Our work combines data from the World Bank Business Pulse Surveys (BPS) and the COVID-19 follow-up of the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) for the (almost) two years between April 2020 and September 2021. Since the onset of the pandemic, these surveys have been monitoring the impact of the pandemic on the private sector across the world on critical dimensions of business performance, such as sales. For most countries, the sampling frame for the BPS was based on firm censuses from Statistics Agencies or business listings from Ministries of Finance or Economy and 4