Essays on Resource Adjustment

Abstract

This dissertation is comprised of two essays on labor resource adjustment. The first essay, entitled An Empirical Analysis of Gender Differences in Asymmetric Labor Adjustment, discusses the gender difference in asymmetric labor adjustment and its association with female underrepresentation at the executive level (a.k.a., the glass ceiling). Based on detailed gender-specific employment disclosures of Korean listed firms, I document a set of novel findings. First, I report the significant presence of labor cost stickiness in general, consistent with prior studies. Decomposing labor costs, I further show that it is mainly attributable to asymmetric adjustment of employment rather than that of wages. More importantly, the asymmetric labor adjustment is more salient for males than it is for females, suggesting that managers tend to dismiss females to a greater extent than males during sales downturns than they recruit during sales upturns. Additional analyses present several cross-sectional variations in differential labor adjustment across gender. Second, gender differences in asymmetric labor adjustment widen the tenure gap across gender, contributing to the glass ceiling. The second essay, entitled Media Attention and Audit Labor Mix, investigates whether and how auditors respond to client firm media attention in their audit risk assessments. Using novel data on audit fees, audit hours, and audit hours by rank, this study finds that auditors charge higher audit fees to client firms that have greater media attention (e.g., media coverage, negative publicity) to reduce audit risk, consistent with the medias disciplining role. In addition, audit fee increases do not occur via increasing audit risk premiums (e.g., audit fees per hour), but by increasing audit effort (e.g., audit hours) in general, and by increasing the audit hours of partner and senior CPAs rather than junior CPAs in particular. In additional analyses, I find that Big 4 auditors show a stronger association between media attention and greater input from experienced CPAs and that auditors are more likely to resign from clients with greater media attention. Overall, the findings indicate that auditors view media as an information source in audit risk assessment, affecting audit labor mix and thus audit production costs.