Employee Satisfaction and Market Sentiment During COVID-19

Abstract

This paper examines the possible channels through which employee satisfaction benefits stockholders during COVID-19. We use the Best Place to Work list from Glassdoor as our measure of employee satisfaction. This measure is comprehensive since it is positively correlated with firms’ adoption of corporate policies that support employees’ well-being. Our results show that having satisfied employees serves as a moderating factor in mitigating the detrimental impact of equity market fluctuations in extreme turmoil conditions. We find that the channel through which employee satisfaction helps firms resist external economic shocks is the positive market sentiment toward these firms during the crash.