Understanding the real effects of financial shocks is essential for the design of effective growth-restoring policies. This column uses data on job contracts matched with the universe of firms and their banks from a region of Italy to analyse the employment effects of financial shocks. Financially constrained firms – especially the least productive ones – significantly reduced employment, mostly of less-educated and lower-skilled workers with temporary contracts. While these results suggest possible distributional effects across workers, they could also reflect a productivity-enhancing reallocation function of financial shocks.