Research

Job Market Paper

Workforce Strain in the Production of Accounting Estimates: Evidence from CECL Adoption

I examine whether an information-intensive accounting standard strains the specialized employees responsible for its implementation. Using regulatory filings and Glassdoor reviews classified by job function, I study U.S. banks’ adoption of the current expected credit loss (CECL) standard through within-bank comparisons across employee functions. Following adoption, risk-function employees, who perform the forecasting and modeling required by CECL, report a decline in work-life balance relative to other employees in the same bank. Written reviews corroborate this increase in strain, with more complaints about workload and managerial support among risk-function employees. Credit-loss allowances are more predictive of subsequent net charge-offs when prior risk-function work-life balance is better relative to that of other employees. This association between workforce conditions and allowance informativeness is stronger under CECL than under the incurred-loss model, with the clearest statistical evidence at the two-quarter horizon. The findings document workforce strain as an employee burden of accounting regulation and connect it with the informativeness of accounting estimates.

Dissertation Committee: Kalin Kolev (Chair), Heedong Kim, Dexin Zhou, and Edgar Rodriguez-Vazquez

Paper    Appendix   

Working Papers

Economic Policy Uncertainty and Stakeholder Attention in CSR Disclosure

with Mingyuan Kong

We examine how firms adjust CSR disclosure when economic policy uncertainty increases. We find that firms increase disclosure transparency and reallocate attention toward employee-related topics as uncertainty rises, with employee-focused disclosure associated with more favorable subsequent employee perceptions when uncertainty is high.

Under review at The British Accounting Review

Presented at: FMA European Conference 2026; JAAF Symposium (International) 2026; European Financial Management Association Annual Meeting 2025; Financial Management & Accounting Research Conference 2025

Paper

Retail Trading Activity and Informativeness of O/S

with Youngmin Choi and Heedong Kim

We examine the role of retail investors in the informativeness of options trading. We find that the option-to-stock trading volume ratio (O/S) is substantially more predictive of future stock returns when retail trading activity is high, suggesting that retail investors contribute value-relevant information to price discovery.