degree of cost stickiness at the firm level varies with the strictness of the country-level EPL provisions. This finding … supports the theory that cost stickiness reflects the deliberate resource commitment decisions of managers in the presence of …

We synthesize the growing literature on asymmetric cost behavior — a new way of thinking about costs and, by extension …, earnings. While the traditional cost behavior model describes a mechanistic relation between activity and costs, this … alternative view recognizes the primitives of cost behavior — resource adjustment costs and managerial decisions. These primitives …