讲座人：Konstantinos Stathopoulos

讲座主题：Does Employee Ownership Reduce Strike Risk? Evidence from U.S. Union Elections

摘要：This paper investigates the impact of employee stock options (ESO) on the decision by labor unions to initiate strikes. By exploiting the unique setting of union elections in U.S. firms, we employ a triple-differences specification and find that firms offering higher levels of equity incentives to their employees are exposed to significantly lower likelihood of union strikes. We interpret this moderating effect of ESO incentives on the post-unionization strike risk as evidence consistent with ESO realigning the interests of organized labor with those of their employers following the unionization event. Consistent with this conjecture, additional tests using both difference-in-differences (DID) and regression discontinuity design (RDD) present robust evidence that firms strategically grant more option incentives to employees in response to the increased strike risk due to unionization. The increase in option incentives is more pronounced among (1) firms holding union elections in non-right-to-work states, where labor unions enjoy stronger bargaining power and (2) firms in low-skill industries, where the strike risk is perceived to be higher. Our findings have implications not only for the U.S. context but also for other jurisdictions with more powerful labor union movements, thus greater need for risk management against strikes.

讲座时间：2018年10月10日，周三，15:30开始

讲座地点：学院南路学术会堂702

讲座人简介：Professor Konstantinos Stathopoulos is a corporate governance scholar and holds a Chair in Accounting and Finance at Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester. He has twenty years of experience conducting research across most areas of corporate governance research, with a particular focus on executive compensation and how suboptimal governance practices may destroy stakeholder wealth. He has published extensively in leading international journals such as the Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Corporate Finance, British Journal of Management, Corporate Governance: An International Review, Journal of International Money and Finance, and European Accounting Review. He is an associate editor of Corporate Governance: An International Review and previously served on the editorial board of the British Journal of Management. He acts as an ad hoc reviewer for a number of academic journals, including Abacus, British Accounting Review, Corporate Governance: An International Review, Journal of Business Ethics, the Journal of Business, Finance and Accounting, Journal of Corporate Finance and Journal of Banking and Finance.