Corporate culture as an implicit contract

Authors Jeffers, Lee
Year 2019
Type Working Paper
Abstract We develop a measure of corporate culture using coworker connectivity on LinkedIn's platform, and show it is strongly correlated with positive employee relations and satisfaction. Using state-level changes to employment agreements as shocks to explicit contracts, we find that these changes significantly impact employees in weakly connected firms, but have little to no effect on those at strongly connected firms. Our results suggest that firms with strong corporate culture are less dependent on explicit contracts to retain human capital. We document implications for firms' investment decisions and other outcomes.
Keywords Corporate culture, human capital, implicit contracts, non-competes
URL https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3426060
Tags Archival Empirical  |   Investment Decisions (Institutional)  |   Manager / Firm Behavior  |   Media and Textual Analysis  |   Social Network Structure