Alternative Work Arrangements and Cost of Equity: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment

Author(s):  
Atsushi Chino

I examine whether firms’ use of alternative work arrangements, particularly temporary agency workers, affects their cost of equity. Exploiting a major labor-market deregulation in Japan that induced manufacturing firms to increase their employment of temporary agency workers, I show that the cost of equity decreased in manufacturing firms, relative to nonmanufacturing firms, after the deregulation. Further analysis using variations within manufacturing firms provides corroborating evidence. The rigidity in labor expenses and the cost of debt also decreased in manufacturing firms. Overall, alternative work arrangements increase the flexibility in labor costs, leading to lower operating leverage and cost of capital.

2003 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly E. Frank ◽  
D. Jordan Lowe

Employees are requesting more flexibility in their work schedules to be able to integrate work with other aspects of their family and personal lives. While alternative work arrangements are being offered at progressively more companies, it is unclear whether the work culture accepts these arrangements as a viable work alternative. Here we examine the extent to which flextime and telecommuting arrangements impact management accountants' performance evaluations, job commitment, and career progression as compared to working a traditional schedule. We also examine whether these arrangements are perceived as being less acceptable for men than for women. One-hundred sixty management accountants from 90 companies participated in our experiment. The results indicate that participation in alternative work arrangements did not impact perceptions of current task performance or job commitment. However, participation led to significantly lower perceptions of long-term career potential.


2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry R. Adler ◽  
Gabriel D. Isaacs ◽  
Robert L. Steiner

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 34.2pt 0pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Organizations that successfully outsource may see better value-creation in creating a sustainable competitive advantage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The objectives of this study were threefold:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>a) provide a framework for studying the effects of perceived distrust that leads to dominance, b) analyze how opportunism parlays into the concept of dominance, and c) determine if the relationship between outsource partners varies by analyzing transaction characteristics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Our research shows that firms should take caution to fully understand the effects that contract size has on a firm&rsquo;s resources.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"></span></span></span></span></p>


2009 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 101-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ignacio Vélez-Pareja ◽  
Joseph Tham

Most finance textbooks present the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) calculation as: WACC = Kd×(1-T)×D% + Ke×E%, where Kd is the cost of debt before taxes, T is the tax rate, D% is the percentage of debt on total value, Ke is the cost of equity and E% is the percentage of equity on total value. All of them precise (but not with enough emphasis) that the values to calculate D% y E% are market values. Although they devote special space and thought to calculate Kd and Ke, little effort is made to the correct calculation of market values. This means that there are several points that are not sufficiently dealt with: Market values, location in time, occurrence of tax payments, WACC changes in time and the circularity in calculating WACC. The purpose of this note is to clear up these ideas, solve the circularity problem and emphasize in some ideas that usually are looked over. Also, some suggestions are presented on how to calculate, or estimate, the equity cost of capital.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 170-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tito Boeri ◽  
Giulia Giupponi ◽  
Alan B. Krueger ◽  
Stephen Machin

The nature of self-employment is changing in most OECD countries. Solo self-employment is increasing relative to self-employment with dependent employees, often being associated with the development of gig economy work and alternative work arrangements. We still know little about this changing composition of jobs. Drawing on ad-hoc surveys run in the UK, US, and Italy, we document that solo self-employment is substantively different from self-employment with employees, being an intermediate status between employment and unemployment, and for some, becoming a new frontier of underemployment. Its spread originates a strong demand for social insurance which rarely meets an adequate supply given the informational asymmetries of these jobs. Enforcing minimum wage legislation on these jobs and reconsidering the preferential tax treatment offered to self-employment could discourage abuse of these positions to hide de facto dependent employment jobs. Improved measures of labor slack should be developed to acknowledge that, over and above unemployment, some of the solo self-employment and alternative work arrangements present in today’s labor market are placing downward pressure on wages.


2010 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 483-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian D. Gow ◽  
Gaizka Ormazabal ◽  
Daniel J. Taylor

ABSTRACT: We review and evaluate the methods commonly used in the accounting literature to correct for cross-sectional and time-series dependence. While much of the accounting literature studies settings in which variables are cross-sectionally and serially correlated, we find that the extant methods are not robust to both forms of dependence. Contrary to claims in the literature, we find that the Z2 statistic and Newey-West corrected Fama-MacBeth standard errors do not correct for both cross-sectional and time-series dependence. We show that extant methods produce misspecified test statistics in common accounting research settings, and that correcting for both forms of dependence substantially alters inferences reported in the literature. Specifically, several findings in the implied cost of equity capital literature, the cost of debt literature, and the conservatism literature appear not to be robust to the use of well-specified test statistics.


ILR Review ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 382-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence F. Katz ◽  
Alan B. Krueger

To monitor trends in alternative work arrangements, the authors conducted a version of the Contingent Worker Survey as part of the RAND American Life Panel in late 2015. Their findings point to a rise in the incidence of alternative work arrangements in the US economy from 1995 to 2015. The percentage of workers engaged in alternative work arrangements—defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers—rose from 10.7% in February 2005 to possibly as high as 15.8% in late 2015. Workers who provide services through online intermediaries, such as Uber or TaskRabbit, accounted for 0.5% of all workers in 2015. Of the workers selling goods or services directly to customers, approximately twice as many reported finding customers through off-line intermediaries than through online intermediaries.


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