Measuring Organizational Capital

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Cai, Wei; Prat, Andrea; Yu, Jiehang
• 署名单位: Columbia University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ACCOUNTING RESEARCH
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0021-8456; 1475-679X
• DOI: 10.1111/1475-679x.70073
• 发表日期: 2026-06-08
• 关键词: organizational capital; Intangibles; Corporate culture; employee reviews; Glassdoor; Textual analysis; measurement; firm

摘要

Prior research has pointed to differences in organizational capital as a reason for the persistent performance discrepancies among otherwise similar firms. In this paper, we develop and validate a new measure of organizational capital. Based on over a million crowd-sourced employee reviews scraped from Glassdoor, we construct the measure of organizational capital at the firm-year level using the word embedding model and ChatGPT-generated synthetic reviews. Our measure varies over time in accordance with macro trends, and differs both across and within firms, reflecting firm heterogeneity and major internal changes. We validate our measure by testing empirical predictions of the properties of organizational capital discussed in prior literature. Our findings suggest that this measure captures a slowly evolving intangible asset that is significantly associated with firm performance and top management's influence, aligning with the conceptualization of organizational capital by Dessein and Prat. We further showcase applications of our measure in accounting, economics, finance, and management literature. Taken together, the paper provides implications for various stakeholders who are interested in assessing and managing firms' organizational capital.