December 11, 2025
The Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications will host invited speaker Konstantinos-Stavros Politis for a talk titled Is Corporate Labor Misconduct Risk Priced? Evidence from 10-K Disclosures and Violation Penalties on Thursday 18 December 2025 at 15.00pm EET.
The talk will be held in person at the Lecture Room of the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications.
About the talk: Existing measures of firm labor misconduct risk are subject to shortcomings, constraining our ability to study whether and how these risks are priced in stock markets. We develop novel firm-level measures of labor misconduct risk for U.S. public firms by combining 10-K risk disclosures, labor-related violation penalties, and a comprehensive labor-risk dictionary. Our measures capture distinct risk dimensions related to benefit and wage violations, employment discrimination, and workplace safety breaches. They reflect regulatory and industry dynamics, exhibit substantial cross-firm variation, and are positively associated with future stock return volatility. Labor misconduct risk is higher among bigger, more profitable firms with greater institutional ownership. While realized stock returns show no significant labor risk premium, option-implied expected returns reveal a negative premium that rises during recessions and strengthens after 2014, coinciding with tighter labor regulation. These findings suggest investors view high labor misconduct risk firms as hedges against aggregate economic downturns.
Short Bio: Konstantinos-Stavros Politis is a final-year PhD student at the Department of Banking and Financial Management at the University of Piraeus. He holds an MSc in Macroeconomic Policy and Financial Markets from the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics and a Ptychion in Finance from the University of Piraeus. His research interests include asset pricing and asset management, machine learning, and sustainability. During his PhD, he worked as a scientific associate at the University of Piraeus Research Center on the project “Informational Content of Market Option Prices”, funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation (ELIDEK). Prior to joining the PhD program, he worked as a financial services consultant at PwC and as an accountant at TMS Bulkers and Seacharm Navigation.