Disclosed Human-Capital Disruption and Firm-Specific Risk

Human capital is a central organizational input, but standard financial data reveal little about firm-specific disruptions to workforce availability, cost, skills, and continuity. I construct a measure of disclosed human-capital disruption from earnings calls using author-defined coding criteria and a contextual language model. Within firms, a one-standard-deviation increase in the annual measure is associated with 0.55 percentage points higher idiosyncratic volatility, 0.58 percentage points higher downside deviation, and a 0.46 percentage point lower worst monthly return, with no corresponding relation to market beta. The results are stable across seven broader and narrower classification rules and remain after removing explicit labor-shortage passages and controlling for a recently published labor-shortage measure and transcript-wide negative and uncertain language. At the call level, human-capital disruption predicts approximately 0.50% higher idiosyncratic volatility over the following 42 trading days after conditioning on pre-call risk. Risk is elevated before the call as well, and the score predicts the continuation of that firm-specific risk state over the following 42 trading days. After telegraphing and succession passages are removed, the measure also predicts subsequent named-executive roster exits and the incumbent CEO's effective departure from office. Earnings calls therefore reveal disturbances to a key organizational input that are broader than labor shortages and informative about the distribution of firm outcomes.