 Labor mobility and antitakeover provisionsAiyesha Dey and Joshua White Journal of Accounting and Economics, 2021, vol. 71, issue 2 Abstract: How do firms protect their human capital? We test whether firms facing an increased threat of being acquired strengthen their antitakeover provisions (ATPs) in order to bond with their employees. We use the adoption of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD) by US state courts, which exogenously decreases knowledge-worker mobility, thus elevating takeover risk and reducing employee incentives to innovate. Firms respond to the IDD adoption by strengthening ATPs that defend against hostile takeovers, especially when they have greater ex-ante employee mobility and human capital and place greater importance on employee relations. We find no evidence that managers strengthen ATPs for entrenchment or takeover bargaining purposes in this setting. Our findings show that ATPs can be used to credibly commit to employees in order to protect long-term value creation. Keywords: Corporate governance; Antitakeover provisions; Labor mobility; Implicit contracting; Employee bonding; Stakeholders (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jaecon:v:71:y:2021:i:2:s0165410121000033 DOI: 10.1016/j.jacceco.2021.101388 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Accounting and Economics is currently edited by J. L. Zimmerman, S. P. Kothari, T. Z. Lys and R. L. Watts More articles in Journal of Accounting and Economics from Elsevier |
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