This paper investigates whether social capital plays a role in bank misconduct. I find that U.S. banks headquartered in high social capital areas, as indicated by the strength of civic norms and the density of social networks, are less likely to face enforcement actions. This relationship is mainly significant for banks with a lower geographical dispersion, and it holds in a range of robustness and endogeneity tests. I run additional tests based on classes of enforcement actions, components of social capital, risk-taking, opacity, and bank actions associated with negative externalities. These tests deliver results supporting the idea that the main findings of the paper are largely attributed to social capital's role in exerting external discipline, which prevents misconduct-related behaviors in banks.

This paper examines whether stock market listing influences the persistence of bank performance across crises. We find that for both publicly and privately held banks, bank performance during the 1998 crisis is a strong predictor of bank performance during the 2007–2008 crisis. While for publicly held banks, the persistence is uniquely driven by bottom performers, for privately held banks the persistence is also driven by a group of top performers. We further show that banks that make a private-to-public transition between the two crises underperform in the 2007–08 crisis, especially if they are top performers during the 1998 crisis and more concerned about short-term stock price. We also document that after making a private-to-public transition, banks increase risk in a way that makes them more vulnerable to crises.

In this study, we explore the implications of institutional investor distraction for earnings management. Our identification approach relies on a firm-level measure of institutional investor distraction that exploits exogenous attention-grabbing shocks to unrelated parts of institutional investors' portfolios. We find that firms with distracted institutional shareholders engage more in both accrual-based and real earnings management. Further analyses show that the association between investor distraction and earnings management is stronger in firms with low analyst coverage and weak board monitoring, as well as in firms where managing earnings upward allows meeting or just beating their earnings target. Collectively, our results suggest that managers exploit the loosening in monitoring intensity resulting from investor distraction by engaging in earnings management. Even in the presence of institutional investors with superior monitoring abilities, limited attention may induce insufficient monitoring of earnings management practices.

We analyze how the materialization of physical climate risk in the institutional investors’ portfolios spurs a propagation effect on the information content of stock prices. Institutional investors with a relatively high portfolio exposure to natural disasters divest from disaster-hit stocks, decrease the trading intensity in non-hit stocks, and their trading decisions predict low medium-term returns. At the firm-level, institutional investors propagate the effects of disasters to non-hit stocks through reduced incorporation of firm-specific information, especially when the stocks represent a low portfolio weight. Combined, these results suggest that natural disasters trigger a rational reallocation of information-processing resources by institutional investors.