Abstract Using exogenous shocks on the ability to issue seasoned equity offerings (SEOs), we show SEOs lead to a higher employee skill composition, that is, a lower (higher) proportion of low (high) skilled workers. The decrease in low-skilled workers exceeds the increase in high-skilled workers, resulting in reduced employment at the firm level. These effects are more significant when firms invest more in technology following SEOs and face greater financial constraints before SEOs, suggesting that SEOs relieve budget constraints on technology investments. These findings demonstrate that while external equity financing helps upgrade technology to improve productivity, it has a dark side for low-skilled workers.

We examine the relation between earnings smoothing and stock price crash risk to evaluate the role of earnings smoothing on the downside risk of equity values. We find that, within firm, a higher degree of earnings smoothing is associated with greater crash risk; and this association, in the cross-section, is more pronounced for firms with fewer analysts following, smaller institutional holdings, and positive cumulative discretionary accruals. We also use stock returns to assess the economic significance of our results. We find that, controlling for firm fixed effects, earnings smoothing is associated with sizable negative returns in the quarter following the earnings announcement. Our findings caution investors about the downside risk of firms reporting smooth earnings, in contrast to the conventional belief that these firms are low in equity risk.

We examine whether industry product market conditions are important in assessing the benefits and costs of chief executive officer (CEO) power. We find that firms are more likely to have powerful CEOs in high demand product markets where firms are facing entry threats. In these markets, investors react favorably to announcements granting more power to CEOs, and CEO power is associated with higher market value, sales growth, investment, advertising, and the introduction of more new products. Our results remain significant when addressing the endogeneity of CEO power by instrumenting CEO power with past non-CEO executive and director sudden deaths.