Thesis: This thesis investigates the role of collateral environment and trade exposure on the allocation of employment across firms and sectors. The first chapter argues that, in these economies with poor institutional quality of collateral and bankruptcy laws, aggressive collateralization makes the risk-taking behavior of borrowers suboptimally more costly. This discourages entrepreneurship and thus impedes the growth potential among young firms with a potentially high impact on job creation in the economy.Second chapter stresses the "disconnection" channel on the performance of firms when stringent collateral environment impedes the access of firms to financial system. Studying the 6 economies in MENA we observe region is characterized by an unusually highshare of firms that do not need external finance. These firms are less likely to view access to finance as a major concern, are less likely to have purchased fixed assets, andare less likely to plan further expansion. These findings also hold after accounting fora standard set of firm characteristics. In the third chapter, I move to a sample of OECD countries. A growing body of literature emphasizes the role of trade with emerging economies, especially with China, in job destruction in the manufacturing sectors andin the deindustrialization process currently seen in advanced economies. However, to quantify the relevance of exposure to imports from emerging markets, the trade channel needs to be disentangled from the traditional productivity channel. Developing asimple model of structural change in an open economy, I derive empirical implicationsto analyze for a sample of OECD countries. The model illustrates when productivity growth of domestic manufacturing is faster than that of services but slower than that of foreign manufacturing, the share of manufacturing in advanced economies may fall,both in terms of value added and of employment. I call this phenomenon "twin deindustrialization".My empirical results indicate significant and quantitatively relevant effects of trade on structural change in advanced economies. Furthermore, while many studies investigate the accelerating volume of imports from China post 2000 to explain the pattern of deindustrialization in advance economies, I stress that the shift in the composition of Chinese exports towards the ICT sectors and the changing nature of technological progress occurring in emerging economies are important considerations in understanding the pattern of deindustrialization in the post 2000 period.