Investor attention matters for corporate actions. Our new identification approach constructs firm-level shareholder “distraction” measures, by exploiting exogenous shocks to unrelated parts of institutional shareholders’ portfolios. Firms with “distracted” shareholders are more likely to announce diversifying, value-destroying, acquisitions. They are also more likely to grant opportunistically timed CEO stock options, more likely to cut dividends, and less likely to fire their CEO for bad performance. Firms with distracted shareholders have abnormally low stock returns. Combined, these patterns are consistent with a model in which the unrelated shock shifts investor attention, leading to a temporary loosening of monitoring constraints. Received February 7, 2014; editorial decision July 6, 2016 by Editor David Hirshleifer.

Most online marketplaces are peer-to-peer. Credit ones, however, are not and they have resurrected many features of traditional financial intermediaries. To understand why, we use online credit as a laboratory to investigate the value of financial intermediation. We develop a structural model of online debt crowdfunding and estimate it on a novel database. We find that abandoning the peer-to-peer paradigm raises lender surplus, platform profits, and credit provision, but exposes investors to liquidity risk. A counterfactual where the platform resembles a bank by bearing liquidity risk can generate larger lender surplus and credit provision when liquidity is low and lenders are risk averse.