We examine the relation between a firm’s reliance on high-skill workers and its accounting conservatism. We find that reliance on high-skill workers is negatively related to accounting conservatism, presumably because firms with higher labor adjustment costs are more concerned about the cost...

We study labor unions, an important stakeholder group that has not been a focus of the earnings smoothing literature. We posit that managers strike a balance between sheltering resources from employees’ profit sharing demands and catering to employees’ aversion to downside risk by smoothing...

The economic literature shows that production market competition could have nonlinear effects on corporate behaviors, such as management effort and innovative activities. We extend the literature by focusing on the influence of product market competition on earnings quality. We propose and...