LinkedIn resumes have become prevalent public disclosures that employees regularly update to present their experience in the labor market. We examine whether these resume revisions reflect employees’ assessments of their firms’ prospects and, in aggregate, predict future firm performance. Using current and historical LinkedIn profiles for more than 3 million individuals, we track changes to the experience descriptions for the same positions over time. We find that aggregate resume-revision activity predicts weaker future firm performance and more negative subsequent earnings surprises. These predictive relations are stronger for revisions by employees in managerial roles or with greater experience, who are better positioned to access and interpret value-relevant internal information. We further show that resume revisions continue to predict both firm performance and earnings surprises even when measured only among employees who remain with the firm, and that these results are not explained by turnover or retention-related costs. Resume revisions also predict abnormal returns, consistent with employees acting on information not yet incorporated into stock prices. Taken together, our findings suggest that employees’ incentives to revise their resumes respond to internal signals about firm prospects before these signals are fully reflected in financial reports or market expectations. Individually motivated labor-market disclosures can therefore collectively reveal timely information about firm prospects through a distinct channel that firms neither initiate nor control.

This study examines how audit offices’ use of early promotion—promoting associates to senior ahead of the regular promotion schedule—relates to audit quality. Early promotion can help firms deploy and retain talent but also places less-experienced auditors in roles requiring greater review, supervision, and judgment. Using LinkedIn employment histories, we identify associate-to-senior promotions within Big 4 audit offices and link offices’ promotion practices to the audit outcomes of their public-company clients. We find that greater use of early promotion is associated with fewer restatements, particularly severe Big R restatements. The favorable relation is stronger for more complex engagements, where demands on senior-level judgment and coordination are greater. We also find that early promotion is associated with greater auditor retention, consistent with retention as one channel through which accelerated advancement may benefit audit production. Instrumental-variable analyses, tests of reverse causality and general promotion intensity, and a falsification test using promotion practices in tax and advisory yield similar inferences. Overall, our findings suggest that audit firms can selectively accelerate advancement without sacrificing audit quality, despite the lower pre-promotion experience of auditors who advance early.

We examine how private equity (PE) investment reshapes audit firms when independence regulation bars sponsors from controlling the audit practice, leaving the composition of a firm’s client portfolio as the primary observable margin of sponsor influence. Using comprehensive UK filings that capture audit firms’ full public and private client portfolios, we link PE-backed auditors to their sponsors’ sector exposures and trace how their portfolios evolve in a matched difference-in-differences design around the investment. At the platform stage, we find that PE sponsors are less likely to invest in audit firms whose portfolios are sector-aligned with the sponsor’s own, a pattern more consistent with concentration-cost discipline than with cross-selling. Post-investment, however, PE-backed firms grow disproportionately in sponsor-aligned sectors, in both client count and client assets, and this growth runs through private clients, with no detectable counterpart among public companies. Rival auditors grow alongside them rather than contracting, indicating that PE expands audit-market coverage rather than redistributing it. Our evidence identifies client-portfolio composition as a central channel through which external capital reshapes a profession built on independence, with implications for audit-market concentration and the oversight of alternative practice structures.

We examine how the introduction of generative AI reshapes the organizations new firms build. Using the ChatGPT’s public release as a shock, we compare venture-backed startups by their GenAI exposure and find the more-exposed ones scale headcount more slowly after the release. They also begin to carry more capital and market value per employee, consistent with capital-labor substitution. The slowed hiring rate is most pronounced where a firm’s ability to substitute GenAI for labor is greatest: among startups building AI products, those led by AI-technical executives, and those already hiring for AI roles before the ChatGPT release. Within firms, the effect of ChatGPT’s release on hiring growth falls on early-career, remote-suitable, and specialized workers. The lean scaling response is specific to startup firms, which react to the release with little legacy employment. Newly public firms with established workforces increase hiring rates, even for early-career, remote-suitable, and specialized workers, consistent with GenAI exposure prompting increased labor investment at scaling firms that face labor force adjustment costs. Overall, the results indicate that generative AI is changing how new firms are built, altering their mix of labor and capital rather than only the exposure of individual occupations.

Shareholder resolutions are primary avenues for investor engagement in corporate governance. While institutional investors have historically predominated this sphere, an emergent shift towards retail shareholder activists—denoted as ’corporate gadflies’—ignites a dynamic tension between these gadflies and corporate executives. I exploit gadflies’ shareholder resolutions and the annual shareholder meeting setting to understand the determinants and consequences of gadflies’ ESG activism. I find that visibility serves as the primary driver for the intensity of gadflies’ ESG activism, while cost yields a comparatively modest impact. Further, firms respond to corporate gadflies’ ESG voice selectively. Firms address general ESG topics like CSR strategy-related resolutions while ignoring more costly voices such as human rights concerns. In terms of the horizon, the effects of gadflies’ activism can only improve ESG performance metrics in the long run. Overall, my results suggest that while firms do respond to gadflies’ ESG activism, the reactions are characterized by selective acceptance and a prolonged integration process.