Layoff and Employment Guarantee Announcements: How Do Shareholders Respond?

Event study methodology was used to assess the effects of both layoff and employment guarantee announcements on shareholder returns. The Wall Street Journal was used to identify 368 firms that announced layoffs and 13 firms that announced employment guarantees in 1993 or 1994. The results were used to test the validity of four hypotheses: labor-cost, efficiency, industrial-relation-effect, and signalling-effect hypotheses. The results show that both layoff announcements and employment guarantee announcements induced a decrease in the shareholder returns of the firms that made the announcements. Each of the above four models received partial support.layoffs; downsizing; event study; employment guarantee

On the Zeros of Some Generalized Hypergeometric Functions

AbstractLet a1,…,ap,b1,…,bp be real constants with a1,…,ap≠0,−1,−2,… and b1,…,bp>0, and let pFp(z)=pFp(a1,…,ap;b1,…,bp;z). It is shown that the following three conditions are equivalent to each other: (i) pFp(z) has only a finite number of zeros, (ii) pFp(z) has only real zeros, and (iii) the aj's can be re-indexed so that a1=b1+m1,…,ap=bp+mp for some nonnegative integers m1,…,mp

The dark side of corporate social responsibility

The interests of employees take a back seat when firms mobilise resources for CSR, write Heung-Jun Jung and Dong-One Ki