Work-Life Balance and Firm Financial Performance

[eng] This thesis investigates whether, and under what conditions, employee work-life balance (WLB) enhances corporate financial performance (CFP). Through bibliometric and content analysis of forty peer-reviewed studies (2000–2025), we identify a fragmented research landscape dominated by single-period, single-country designs and four theoretical perspectives: reciprocity-based, capability-based, legitimacy-based, and cost-based perspectives, revealing a critical need for longitudinal multinational studies with standardized profitability metrics. Addressing these gaps, we first analyze eight-year panel data from twenty-six Spanish firms, combining SABI accounting records with 25,077 employee reviews of WLB practices from Indeed.com, demonstrating a significant positive WLB-CFP association. Subsequently expanding to Orbis accounting data and Glassdoor WLB metrics across 154 firms in nineteen European countries, we confirm this robust positive relationship while finding no significant moderating effect of national legal traditions, indicating firm-level implementation supersedes macro-level legal frameworks. Our contributions include synthesizing extant literature, empirically validating the predominantly positive WLB-CFP relationship, and providing longitudinal multinational evidence invariant to legal contexts, with practical implications for managers to position WLB as a value-generating strategic investment and policymakers to advocate flexible work initiatives, while suggesting new research avenues in employee-centric corporate social responsibility.