Foreign Ownership and Labor Investment Efficiency*

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of foreign ownership on firms’ labor investment efficiency, which is an essential factor for the firms’ long-term operating performance. Further, this paper examines whether foreign ownership alleviates over or under investment in labor, focusing on the Korean stock market. Using Korean listed 22,924 firm/year observations from 1997 to 2019, we estimate abnormal net hiring by using the abnormal portion of net hiring for each firm/year observations. The empirical results suggest that foreign ownership is negatively associated with the absolute value of abnormal net hiring, which indicates that foreign ownership enhances firms’ labor investment efficiency. Additional analyses suggest that foreign ownership alleviates over and underinvestment in labor in the Korean stock market. Further analyses suggest that foreign ownership’s monitoring effect toward labor investment efficiency enhances sustainability operating performance. Robustness tests, including firm-fixed effects and two-stage least squares estimation, supports our main results. There is an ongoing debate on whether foreign ownership’ active monitoring role in developing countries. Foreign ownership conducts an active monitoring role in developing countries regarding labor investment. Thus, our results suggest that foreign ownership may be an one of determinant of enhancing firms’ labor investment efficiency in Korean stock marekt.