Labor unionization and real earnings management: Evidence from labor elections

Vivek Astvansh, Beibei Wang, Tao Chen and Jimmy Chengyuan Qu

PLOS ONE, 2024, vol. 19, issue 2, 1-27

Abstract: By exploiting the local randomness in close-call labor elections, the authors find a negative impact of labor unionization at a firm on its real earnings management (REM). The finding suggests a managerial pressure effect of increased labor power. In a local regression discontinuity (RD) analysis, firms that narrowly pass the 50% threshold show a significant decrease in REM, relative to their peers that narrowly fail. This effect is stronger for firms headquartered in right-to-work states and when managers have less pressure to manage earnings. Evidence from a global parametric RD analysis and a multivariate OLS test using industry-level unionization measures confirms the external validity of results in local RD analysis. Overall, the research sheds new light on the economic consequence of labor unionization on employers’ accounting decisions.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0292889 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 92889&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0292889

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0292889

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().