IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/reaccs/v30y2025i1d10.1007_s11142-024-09821-z.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Labor market peer firms: understanding firms’ labor market linkages through employees’ internet “also viewed” firms

Author

Listed:
  • Nan Li

    (University of Toronto)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Nan Li, 2025. "Labor market peer firms: understanding firms’ labor market linkages through employees’ internet “also viewed” firms," Review of Accounting Studies, Springer, vol. 30(1), pages 384-435, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:reaccs:v:30:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s11142-024-09821-z
    DOI: 10.1007/s11142-024-09821-z
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11142-024-09821-z
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11142-024-09821-z?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Peer firms; Labor market; Industry classification; Online search; LinkedIn; Glassdoor; Benchmarking;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • G0 - Financial Economics - - General
    • J01 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General - - - Labor Economics: General
    • M2 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Economics

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:reaccs:v:30:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s11142-024-09821-z. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.