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This research explores whether Glassdoor's annual rankings of the Best Places to Work provide meaningful information to shareholders in identifying companies with the potential for superior future performance. Because their website reaches over 64 million unique visitors monthly, Glassdoor rankings can influence trading patterns. Glassdoor’s awards offer a unique way to analyze employees' feedback as there is no self-nomination process or cost involved, differentiating it from other measures of job satisfaction such as Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For survey.

We compare holding period returns of the Best Companies firms to the performance of the S&P 500 index and three separately constructed matched benchmark portfolios. We calculate cumulative raw, risk-adjusted, and abnormal returns based on a buy-and-hold strategy as well as by using the Fama-French (1993) 3-factor and 4-factor models. We also analyze whether selected companies have higher performance one year after the announcement. We control for possible endogeneity problems.

We find mixed evidence regarding the superiority of the Best Company firms in holding period returns and risk-adjusted measures compared to appropriate benchmarks. Longer-term cumulative raw returns show that they have higher annual returns compared with its benchmarks. The differences are not statistically significant on a raw or risk-adjusted basis.

The Best Companies sample is much larger than the matched sample, even with multiple matching methodologies. This difference is limited by the survey design as the employees of larger companies tend to post in Glassdoor survey. Also, since companies in the small Best Companies sample are private companies, comparing their stock performance with comparable companies is challenging.

Human resource management theories argue that job satisfaction results in enhanced corporate performance. However, verification of such satisfaction by a Glassdoor, as a third-party survey, does not necessarily lead to higher risk-adjusted share price performance.

We extend previous work that focuses on analyzing employee reviews to consider the impact of being ranked among the best companies on the survey. Second, we employ an extended set of financial performance measures to assess impact. Our analysis also employs a wider range of financial performance metrics and robustness tests.

Firms are able to reduce financing costs and/or increase the funds available for expansion by minimizing the amount of funds tied up in current assets. We provide insights into the performance of surveyed firms across key components of working capital management by using the CFO magazine’s annual Working Capital Management Survey. We discover that significant differences exist between industries in working capital measures across time. In addition, we discover that these measures for working capital change significantly within industries across time.

Each year since 1983, Fortune magazine has published a survey featuring “America's most admired” corporations. Although the most admired corporations are certainly worthy of some praise and the least admired deserving of criticism, whether these admired companies are worthy of investors' money is less clear. We examine the ex ante and ex post returns of a sample of the most and least admired corporations in the Fortune survey.

Financial technology (fintech) refers to using new technology to improve and automate the delivery and use of financial services. This chapter provides a brief introduction to fintech. It also includes the book's purpose, distinguishing features, intended audience, and structure. A synopsis of Chapters 2 through 23 is offered. The chapter concludes that fintech is constantly evolving and is reshaping finance. Fintechs offer a new paradigm of growth.