This paper presents evidence that labor-saving technologies positively impact a firm's financial leverage. The results are robust with two different measures of labor-saving innovations: automation and process innovations. The effects are more pronounced in firms facing greater labor input rigidity, such as firms with higher labor intensity, share of minimum wage workers, and union coverage. Our analysis suggests that labor-saving innovations reduce wage rigidity, allowing firms to increase financial leverage.

We examine the relationship between audit quality and office-level auditor turnover. Using resumes of over 106,000 Big 4 auditors, we find that audit offices with higher turnover have a greater likelihood of client annual report restatements. This detrimental effect is more pronounced when the departing auditors are more experienced and when the office faces tighter human capital constraints and is primarily attributable to voluntary turnover. Further, such negative effect is borne mostly by complex clients and intangible-intensive clients but is weakened for clients with greater product similarity to the client portfolio of the audit office. Last, the impact of office-level turnover on audit quality persists after controlling for firm-level turnover. Our findings inform the current policy debate on whether and to what extent audit firms should disclose auditor turnover as a potential indicator of audit quality. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

We employ a sharp regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effects of investor-base disclosure (IB DISCLOSE) on funding outcomes and entrepreneurship success. Since February 2016, Kickstarter has disclosed IB information, namely, backer statistics including geographic locations and previous funding experience of the backers, once the number of backers for a project reaches ten. Exploiting this discontinuity, we show the disclosure increases the likelihood of funding success by 10 percent and the amount of funds pledged by 13 percent. The effect is more pronounced when the project quality is high and for projects with less credible creators, high ex ante uncertainty, high information asymmetry between creators and backers, and high financial costs to backers. We also find IB DISCLOSE increases the likelihood of product delivery. Our study highlights the importance of platform-provided disclosure in improving the efficiency of capital allocation.