In the knowledge-based economy, long-term corporate performance and its competitive advantage are strongly associated with human capital. Theoretical deliberations suggest that companies with greater human capital orientation (higher salaries and benefits, more training, a transformational leadership style, better equipment) might perform better than their peers with less human capital orientated strategy due to: higher skills of employees, greater motivation and thus higher overall corporate effectiveness. On the other hand, orientation towards human capital generates higher costs which may negatively affect profitability and stock market valuation. There are two aims of this paper. The first one is to state whether human capital orientated firms generate positive financial performance. The second aim is to compare financial performance of human capital orientated firms with the benchmarking sample to state if the financial performance is above-average. Research was conducted on a sample of 7,204 unique publicly listed companies from the American stock market within a ten year period (72,040 firm-year observations). Empirical studies were carried out with the help of one hypothesis. Two groups of companies were created and their results on financial performance were compared. The first group consisted of human capital orientated firms that were identified with the help of the well-known 100 Best Companies to Work For listing, in line with the Edmans (2009) approach. The second group composed of US-based publicly listed entities from 11 industries. Analysis was conducted for the 2007-2017 years. The key findings of the paper are: strategy based on human capital orientation provides high profitability and leads to above-average financial performance, mainly in the field of equity growth and stock market valuation. The paper has significant practical implications for investors in terms of possible directions of stock market investments aimed at achieving above-average returns as well as for corporate management by indicating that human capital orientation pays off. The paper fills the research gap between two points. First, it states in which financial performance pillars human capital orientated firms perform best. Second, it compares the results of the human capital orientated strategy with the entities from the 11 different industries. Research refers to the American publicly listed enterprises.

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人力资本导向与财务绩效。美国语料库的比较分析

在基于知识的经济中，长期的公司绩效及其竞争优势与人力资本密切相关。理论上的研究表明，人力资本导向更高（薪水和福利更高，培训更多，变革型领导风格，更好的设备）的公司可能会比那些人力资本导向战略更少的同行表现更好，原因是：员工技能更高，动机更高，从而提高整体公司效率。另一方面，以人力资本为导向会产生更高的成本，这可能会对盈利能力和股票市场估值产生负面影响。本文有两个目的。第一个是陈述以人力资本为导向的公司是否产生积极的财务业绩。第二个目标是将以人力资本为导向的公司的财务绩效与基准样本进行比较，以说明财务绩效是否高于平均水平。在十年内对来自美国股票市场的7,204家独特的上市公司进行了抽样研究（72,040个公司年观察）。在一种假设的帮助下进行了实证研究。创建了两组公司，并比较了它们的财务绩效结果。第一组由以人力资本为导向的公司组成，这些公司是根据著名的100家最佳上市公司确定的，符合Edmans（2009）的方法。第二组由来自11个行业的美国上市公司组成。对2007-2017年进行了分析。该论文的主要发现是：基于人力资本导向的战略可提供较高的盈利能力，并导致财务业绩高于平均水平，主要是在股票增长和股票市场估值领域。本文指出了旨在实现高于平均水平的回报的股票市场投资的可能方向，对于投资者以及通过表明人力资本导向都会带来回报的公司管理，具有重大的实际意义。本文填补了两点之间的研究空白。首先，它指出了在哪些财务绩效支柱中，以人力资本为导向的公司表现最佳。其次，它比较了以人力资本为导向的战略与来自11个不同行业的实体的结果。研究是指美国公开上市的企业。