This study examines the role of religion in explaining corporate labor decisions. In particular, we investigate whether local religiousness explains how firms respond to demand changes in terms of labor investment and whether it is associated with labor investment efficiency. Based on data from...

In this paper I contrast the impact of precision, i.e., the level of accuracy with which workers' performance is assessed, on wage costs in U- and J-type tournaments. In U-type tournaments prizes are fixed. In J-type tournaments only an overall wage sum is specified. The principal can increase...

The importance of skilled labor and the inalienability of human capital expose firms to the risk of losing talent in critical times. Using Swedish micro-data, we document that firms lose workers with the highest cognitive and noncognitive skills as they approach bankruptcy. In a...

The issue of asymmetric cost behavior has attracted significant interest in the managerial accounting literature. The literature has hypothesized that adjustment costs, particularly labor adjustment costs, play a significant and central role in driving empirically observed cost behavior...

This study investigates the influence of managerial incentives to meet or beat the zero earnings benchmark on labor cost behavior of private Belgian firms. We posit that relative to managers of firms reporting healthy profits, managers meeting or beating the zero earnings benchmark will increase...