The Hunt Research
Briefing.

More employees than ever are negotiating personalized work arrangements, such as a custom schedule, a special project, or remote days. But who actually gets them? This study of real workgroups found the answer isn't just performance or seniority. It's where you sit in the office's invisible web of relationships.

Employees whom colleagues trust are more likely to win these arrangements. But here's the surprise: being seen as someone who hinders others is far more damaging than being trusted is helpful. Negative reputations carry more weight than positive ones, and those custom deals, in turn, drive performance.

Jahantab, F., Anand, S., Vidyarthi, P. R., & Erdogan, B. (2025). Understanding i-deals through the social ledger lens: The role of trust and hindrance networks. Academy of Management Journal, 68(6).

Hiring managers often pass on candidates who seem overqualified, fearing boredom and turnover. This research flips that logic. When supervisors perceive an employee as overqualified, they tend to hand that person customized, stretch-worthy task assignments, and those tailored tasks are precisely what convert surplus talent into stronger performance.

In other words, overqualification isn't a retention problem waiting to happen. It's spare capacity waiting to be deployed, but only if the job flexes to fit the person.

Jahantab, F., Erdogan, B., Vidyarthi, P. R., & Anand, S. (2025). Individualized deals for overqualified employees. Journal of Organizational Behavior.

In any collaborative enterprise, a project team, a task force, or a research group, someone decides whose name goes first and whose contribution counts. This large-scale study followed men's and women's experiences of that credit-allocation process in real time, across hundreds of collaborations, rather than relying on memory after the fact.

The findings document systematic differences in how women and men experience the negotiation and recognition of contributions to joint work — differences that compound over careers, shaping who advances and who plateaus.

Banks, G. C., et al., including Garcia, M. F. (2025). Women's and men's authorship experiences: A prospective meta-analysis. Journal of Management.

The UN's Sustainable Development Goal 5 calls for gender equality, and a growing number of multinational firms have signed on publicly, but HR research has said surprisingly little about which concrete workplace practices actually move the needle, or whether doing so benefits the firm. This study connects the two.

Firms that pair explicit diversity targets with genuine work-life balance practices and stronger female representation see measurably better social performance — the standard by which firms are judged to be meeting broader stakeholder and societal expectations. The pledge alone doesn't do the work; the practices behind it do.

Garcia, M. F., Liu, H. F., Triana, M. d. C., & Treviño, L. J. (2025). Support for sustainable development goal 5 and social performance: The role of diversity targets, work-life balance practices, and female representation. Human Resource Management, 64(5), 1457–1479.

In 2023, a new 1% excise tax on stock buybacks took effect. Small number, big consequences: aggregate U.S. repurchases fell from roughly $1 trillion in 2022 to just over $800 billion in 2023, with the average firm cutting quarterly buybacks by about 25% — a decline that far outpaced what happened in Canada, where no such tax exists.

Notably, companies did not simply reroute that cash to shareholders through higher dividends. The money stayed put, changing how corporate America returns capital.

Barnes, S. C., Autore, D., Clarke, N., & Schrowang, A. (2025). Corporate share repurchases and the 2023 excise tax. Journal of Corporate Finance, 95, 102881.

When a company issues earnings guidance, analysts revise their forecasts and investors reprice the stock. This study asks an uncomfortable question: does the response depend on whether the CEO delivering that guidance is a man or a woman? The evidence says yes — analyst revisions and investor reactions to management forecasts differ by CEO gender, even when the underlying numbers are comparable.

For boards, investor-relations teams, and the growing ranks of women in the corner office, this is hard evidence that the messenger still shapes how the message is received.

Cook, A., Esplin, A., Glass, C., Judd, J. S., & Olsen, K. (2025). Management forecasts and reactions by analysts and investors: The effect of CEO gender. Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, 52(4), 1840–1867.

U.S. firms hire CEOs from their own home state far more often than chance would predict — a documented “hiring home bias” in the executive labor market. This study asks how the capital markets feel about that habit: do investors price local hires any differently than outside hires?

The answer is yes, and favorably. Firms that hire local CEOs enjoy a lower cost of equity capital — investors effectively demand a smaller return to hold their stock. The effect is strongest at firms that are more locally rooted, draw more local monitoring, communicate more through earnings forecasts, and already have strong governance in place; a state's overall social capital softens the relationship.

Seo, J., Ding, W., Ke, Y., & Shi, Z. (2025). How do investors perceive firms' hiring of local CEOs? Evidence from the cost of equity capital. The British Accounting Review, 101694.

More boards are naming a “lead independent director” (LID) to counterbalance a powerful or combined chair/CEO role — a fix usually framed around oversight and shareholder relations. This study asks whether that governance mechanism reaches all the way into tax strategy.

It does. Companies with LIDs run more conservative tax policies overall, and the effect is largest precisely where it matters most: at firms whose tax avoidance already runs aggressive relative to size and industry peers. Investors, in turn, appear to value that added restraint.

Gao, B., & Omer, T. (2025). Lead independent directors and corporate tax policy. Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, 52(4), 2010–2036.

When Washington's policy direction gets murky, corporate bond markets quietly get harder to trade. This study finds that rising economic policy uncertainty is tied to bond dealers pulling back their inventories and demanding wider spreads to compensate for the added risk — bid-ask spreads widen, price impact rises, and dealer holdings shrink.

The effect is larger for bonds issued by firms with direct exposure to government policy, and the authors use terrorist attacks as a real-world shock to political risk to help confirm the relationship is causal rather than coincidental. It's smaller for calmer markets, smaller firms, and already-illiquid bonds.

Black, J. R., Das, N., & Leal, D. (2025). Economic policy uncertainty and corporate bond liquidity. Journal of Banking & Finance, 170, 107340.

As firms fold AI and robotic process tools into everyday accounting work, professional accountants face judgment calls that existing codes of conduct don't clearly cover. This study works through the specific tensions digitalization introduces — around autonomy, privacy, the balance of power between humans and machines, security, human dignity, doing no harm, and fairness — rather than treating “ethics” as a single generic concern.

From there, the authors propose a concrete ethical decision-making pathway for each type of challenge: a framework that professionals can apply case by case, rather than relying on broad principles that don't cleanly translate into a specific automated workflow.

Tiron-Tudor, A., Rodgers, W., & Deliu, D. (2025). The accounting profession in the Twilight Zone: Navigating digitalisation's sided challenges through ethical pathways for decision-making. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 38(3), 990–1018.