Employee firing costs and accounting conservatism: Evidence from wrongful discharge laws
利用美国各州不当解雇法（WDLs）的逐步实施，研究发现员工解雇成本上升会显著提高企业的条件稳健性，且对劳动密集、解雇倾向高、专用性投资多、风险大的企业影响更强。
Abstract This paper identifies the causal effect of a firm's employee firing costs on its conditional conservatism, using the staggered adoption of US state wrongful discharge laws (WDLs) that increase a firm's cost of firing employees. We find that the adoption of WDLs leads to a significant increase in conditional conservatism. This result is greater for firms that are more labor‐intensive, have higher propensities to fire employees, make more firm‐specific investments and have greater risk. Overall, our findings support the view that higher firing costs lead to greater demand for conditional conservatism to decrease investment inefficiencies because higher firing costs make inefficient investments (including overinvestment in negative‐net present value (NPV) projects and delays in disinvesting poorly performing projects) costlier for the firm.