Labor market peer firms: understanding firms’ labor market linkages through employees’ internet “also viewed” firms
研究基于劳动力市场联系的企业分组，利用领英和Glassdoor的“也浏览过”功能构建同行度量，发现劳动力市场同行能解释股票回报和会计绩效的联动，优于传统行业分组。
Abstract This paper studies the grouping of firms based on their labor-market connections, a significant departure from the traditional approach of grouping based on product-market connections. It also proposes a measure of labor market peers by analyzing the “also viewed” companies on two major online labor market platforms, LinkedIn and Glassdoor. Using the labor market peer measure, I examine whether firms that hire employees with similar skills and that are presumably exposed to the same labor-related risks and shocks exhibit a strong comovement of stock returns and accounting-based performance variables. I find that labor market peers overlap but differ from traditional product-market-based industry groupings, have significant incremental power to explain stock return and accounting-based performance measure comovements, and outperform traditional industry groupings in explaining return and wage comovements when a base firm shares more labor skills with its peers. Overall, the study highlights that labor market peers capture fundamental linkages between firms that are challenging to identify using traditional industry measures.