Reputation, Exposure, and Exit: Organizational Turnover after #MeToo

Roy Baharad, Asaf Eckstein, Gideon Parchomovsky and Rok Spruk

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We study how economy-wide reputational shocks reshape corporate governance by examining board and executive turnover following the MeToo movement. We conceptualize the October 2017 revelations surrounding Harvey Weinstein as a common information shock that increased the expected cost of misconduct and intensified scrutiny across firms. Identification exploits cross-sectional variation in pre-shock exposure, measured by the frequency of Item 5.02 Form 8-K filings, which proxy for firms' sensitivity to governance-related disclosure and reputational risk. We develop a model of organizational exit in which directors respond to changes in reputational pressure through dynamic, belief-driven resignation hazards, generating heterogeneous and potentially nonlinear responses across firms. Empirically, we implement a continuous-treatment difference-in-differences design and complement it with dynamic event-study and matrix-completion estimators. We find that firms with greater pre-shock exposure experience significantly larger increases in resignation activity following the shock. The effects are concentrated in the immediate aftermath of the Weinstein revelations and are amplified through board-level interactions. The findings provide causal evidence that reputational shocks can induce rapid and systematic governance turnover, highlighting the central role of information, exposure, and organizational adaptation in shaping corporate responses to changes in the reputational environment.

Date: 2026-06
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