IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jbfnac/v53y2026i3p1235-1262.html

Workers’ Voices Matter: Crowdsourced Employee Reviews and Insider Trading

Author

Listed:
  • Yifei Chen
  • Dan Palmon

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of crowdsourced employee reviews on insider trading behavior. Leveraging the staggered timing of first‐time employee reviews about their employers on Glassdoor.com, we employ a stacked difference‐in‐differences (DID) model comparing firms with review initiations to those without reviews during the same period. Our findings reveal a statistically and economically significant decrease in insider trading activities for firms with review initiations. The results hold across a series of robustness tests, including propensity score matching, entropy balancing, and alternative time windows for the DID setting. Further analyses suggest that insiders scale back their informed trading activities and earn lower abnormal trading profits following review initiations. The effect is stronger for firms with higher litigation risk, greater reputational cost, stronger labor market pressure, recent employee exploitation incidents, and when the reviews are more negative. Overall, these findings suggest that crowdsourced employee reviews discipline unethical insider trading behavior.

Suggested Citation

  • Yifei Chen & Dan Palmon, 2026. "Workers’ Voices Matter: Crowdsourced Employee Reviews and Insider Trading," Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 53(3), pages 1235-1262, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jbfnac:v:53:y:2026:i:3:p:1235-1262
    DOI: 10.1111/jbfa.70055
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/jbfa.70055
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/jbfa.70055?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jbfnac:v:53:y:2026:i:3:p:1235-1262. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0306-686X .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.