This paper examines how incumbent firms adjust their disclosure behavior in response to heightened labor market competition. Using announcements of large employer entries into local labor markets, I find that incumbent firms located in the affected counties increase the disclosure of positive, forward-looking information. This response is concentrated among incumbent firms that compete more directly with entrant firms for similar workers and is strongest in local labor markets where employee retention pressures are likely to be more severe. Additional analyses show that the response extends to qualitative disclosure, particularly job-related and reputation-enhancing press releases, is associated with more favorable subsequent employment outcomes, and is unlikely to be explained by alternative motives related to productivity spillovers, supply-chain linkages, product market competition, or capital market considerations. Overall, the evidence supports the view that firms use public disclosure to shape employee perceptions and mitigate turnover risk when competition for talent intensifies. Data Availability: Data are available from the public and commercial sources cited in the paper.

ASC 842 requires firms to collect and analyze lease contracts for accounting classification, measurement, and recognition purposes. Leveraging the implementation of ASC 842, I examine firms’ internal accounting hiring and its impact on the efficiency of lease management. I find that the standard prompts lease-intensive firms to significantly increase their internal accounting hiring, which enhances lease-related financial reporting quality. Moreover, firms that increased accounting hiring achieve greater efficiency in managing leases than those that implemented the standard without such hiring. This efficiency gain is incremental to improvements from concurrent information system upgrades and is more pronounced in firms with greater cost-saving opportunities and those that hire more experienced accountants. These results highlight that the benefits of internal accounting hiring extend beyond financial reporting, improving firms’ operational decisions.

The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has released a database of consumer complaints about banks’ financial products to the public since 2013. We find a greater reduction in mortgage applications to banks that receive more mortgage complaints in local markets after the disclosures. The effect is stronger in areas with more sophisticated consumers and higher credit competition, and for banks receiving more severe complaints. The number of monthly mortgage complaints per bank exhibits faster mean reversion after the publication of the database. These findings suggest that the public disclosure of mortgage complaints enhances product market discipline and consumer financial protection.

This study examines whether a real production activity measure, firm‐level electricity consumption growth, is useful in detecting firm financial misreporting. Identifying proxies for a firm's underlying financial performance that are not a function of the firm's accounting system is essential for detection of misreporting. We propose that the difference between revenue growth and electricity consumption growth (i.e., growth wedge (GW)) is a useful signal of financial misreporting. Using electricity consumption data for Korean firms from 2006 to 2014, we find that the GW is positively associated with discretionary revenues and accruals and the likelihood of financial misreporting as proxied by accounting restatements, qualified audit opinions, and regulatory enforcement actions. The GW provides incremental information over firm characteristics and earnings management signals examined by prior research. Our findings are robust to a battery of additional tests, including within‐firm and industry comparisons that do not require access to cross‐sectional firm‐level electricity data. Overall, our study documents new evidence on the role of a real production activity measure from an independent reporting entity in detecting financial misreporting. Our evidence speaks to the potential usefulness of real activity metrics in forensic economics.