Taking Stock of Work-Family Initiatives: How Announcements of “Family-Friendly†Human Resource Decisions Affect Shareholder Value

Michelle M. Arthur and Alison Cook

ILR Review, 2004, vol. 57, issue 4, 599-613

Abstract: This study examines share price reactions to 231 work-family human resource policies adopted by Fortune 500 companies and announced in the Wall Street Journal between 1971 and 1996. Consistent with past research, the results suggest that firm announcements of work-family initiatives positively affected shareholder return. The authors also empirically test three hypotheses concerning how the timing of work-family initiatives influences shareholder reaction. They find that a pioneering company announcing the first-ever implementation of a work-family initiative was likely to realize a larger announcement-day share price increase than did later adopters of the same initiative; the first work-family announcement released by a firm influenced announcement-day share price more than did successive work-family announcements by the same firm; and share price reactions to work-family human resource decisions were not importantly affected by whether those decisions followed a gender discrimination suit.

Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/001979390405700407 (text/html)

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:sae:ilrrev:v:57:y:2004:i:4:p:599-613

DOI: 10.1177/001979390405700407

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in ILR Review from Cornell University, ILR School
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().