Do white-collar employee incentives improve firm profitability?

Abstract We use proprietary archival compensation panel data from Finnish white-collar employees (WCEs) over the period of 2002 to 2011 in order to examine the relationship between performance-based incentives for WCEs and the future profitability of the firm as well as to determine whether this association is moderated by task complexity. While many studies examine the determinants and performance effects of CEO compensation, virtually no evidence has been presented to indicate that explicit financial incentives for WCEs improve the profitability of the firm. Our empirical results show that performance-based incentives for WCEs are significantly positively related to the future return-on-assets, return-on-equity, and profit margin ratios of the firm. We also find that this effect comes from the performance-based incentives for low-level WCEs, corroborating the importance of implementing performance-based incentives also to low-task complexity jobs

Investment–cash flow sensitivity and investor protection

We examine the role of country-level legal investor protection (i.e., shareholder and creditor protection) on firm investment–cash flow sensitivity (ICFS). Using underexplored research data on investor protection across 21 countries and working with a conservative empirical design, we extend prior literature on the relation between investor protection and ICFS and provide new evidence on how these country-level attributes interact to explain a firm's ICFS. We find that either the strong legal protection of minority shareholders or the strong legal protection of creditors reduces the sensitivity of investment to internal cash flow. However, in countries with strong levels of both minority shareholder and creditor protection, ICFS increases. Our results remain robust after controlling for several alternative explanations. The results support the argument that overregulation arises when policymakers increase investor protection at levels that lead firms to avoid external sources of finance, hampering firm investment. Our findings suggest that countries face a regulatory trade-off such that increasing investor protection (either shareholder or creditors protection) enhances financial markets efficiency, but excessive regulation can indeed lead to financial markets inefficiencies