The dynamic interdependencies among the negativity and the positivity in news and user-generated content about safety in a firm's products and the firm's product recalls.

This article examines the dynamic interdependencies among the negativity and the positivity in news and user-generated content about safety in a firm's products (or the lack thereof) and the firm's product recalls. The authors use a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) to unearth theoretically novel and managerially relevant asymmetric associations. Specifically, they find that the negativity in the news negatively correlates with recalls, whereas the negativity in UGC positively correlates with recalls.

Labor unionization and real earnings management: Evidence from labor elections.

By exploiting the local randomness in close-call labor elections, the authors find a negative impact of labor unionization at a firm on its real earnings management (REM). The finding suggests a managerial pressure effect of increased labor power. In a local regression discontinuity (RD) analysis, firms that narrowly pass the 50% threshold show a significant decrease in REM, relative to their peers that narrowly fail.

The social cost of investor distraction: Evidence from institutional cross-blockholding.

Institutional investors routinely hold blocks of stocks in multiple firms within an industry. While such cross-blockholding boosts a portfolio firm's financial performance, could it distract investors from attending to firm activities in a nonfinancial domain, hurting its performance in that domain? The authors answer this question in the context of corporate social responsibility (CSR). They first document that cross-held firms perform worse on social responsibility than non-cross-held firms do.

Academic business research: Impact on academics versus impact on practice.

Business journalists and editors of academic business journals have lamented that academic research has little use for any nonacademic stakeholders, including companies, nonprofits, regulators, and governments. Although emotionally unsettling, these commentaries are bereft of evidence on how well a journal's academic impact (measured by impact factor) translates into practice impact. The authors provide this evidence.