We examine the role of financial reporting quality in facilitating corporate employment. Labor creates operating leverage due to wage rigidity and lacks collateral value, both of which increase credit risk and the importance of information in debt markets. We use firms' predetermined debt...

We examine whether and how accounting conservatism plays a disciplinary role in corporate layoffs. Analyzing 722 layoff announcements in Form 8-K over the period 2004 to 2012, we first document that the level of hiring on average falls short of the optimal level (i.e., under-hiring) even before...

We study labor unions, an important stakeholder group that has not been a focus of the earnings smoothing literature. We posit that managers strike a balance between sheltering resources from employees’ profit sharing demands and catering to employees’ aversion to downside risk by smoothing...

We study manufacturing firms’ asymmetric inventory investment in response to sales changes. Focusing on the costs of resource adjustment and stockout which likely differ in sales-increasing and sales-decreasing periods, we predict and find that inventory investment declines less during periods...