Does accounting comparability affect corporate employment decision-making?

Zhuang Zhang, Collins Ntim, Qingjing Zhang and Mohamed H. Elmagrhi

The British Accounting Review, 2020, vol. 52, issue 6

Abstract: This paper investigates whether accounting comparability affects corporate employment decision-making. We find that firms with greater accounting comparability experience a lower degree of inefficiency in labour investments. Further, our results show that accounting comparability affects labour investments via improved external monitoring and internal governance mechanisms. Additional analyses indicate that our findings are not driven by non-labour investments and are robust to alternative explanations and endogeneity concerns. Collectively, the results are consistent with the view that comparability is an effective monitoring tool, which mitigates agency conflict and thereby reduces opportunistic employment decision-making.

Keywords: Accounting comparability; Labour investment efficiency; Employment decisions; Corporate governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G31 G38 M41 M51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:bracre:v:52:y:2020:i:6:s0890838920300573

DOI: 10.1016/j.bar.2020.100937

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