The rise and subsequent collapse of US house prices was one of the factors underlying the recent financial crisis. One could expect that the crisis brought increased attention to the housing market and thus led to stronger market reactions to house price news. We find that reactions indeed change, but with a peculiar twist: from September 2008 on, good news from the housing market are associated with falling US stock prices, and vice versa. The likely explanation, for which we provide cross-sectional evidence, is that falling house prices increased the market’s trust in a government bailout, thereby increasing market valuations of firms that were expected to benefit from government rescue measures.

We exploit exogenous shocks to institutional investors’ portfolios to show that managers engage in significantly more stakeholder-related misconduct when institutional investors are distracted. Additional cross-sectional tests reveal that managerial career concerns and risk-taking equity incentives strongly moderate this relationship, suggesting that managers weigh the potential benefits and risks before engaging in misconduct during these periods. Finally, we provide evidence that the results are more pronounced when especially those institutional investors who are likely to be motivated monitors of the managers become distracted.

We examine the relationship between corporate culture and initial public offering (IPO) price formation. Using a sample of 935 US IPOs and data on corporate culture from Li et al. (2021b), we find that IPOs of strong culture firms are associated with more positive price revisions and higher initial returns, i.e., more underpricing. These findings hold using an alternative measure of corporate culture, matched samples, and a large set of control variables. Consistent with key theories, the effects appear to be driven by underwriters deliberately compensating investors for revealing information about their perceptions of the firm's culture during bookbuilding.

We investigate the value of investor relations (IR) and find firms with strong IR to experience between five and eight percentage points higher stock returns than those with weak IR during the COVID-19 crisis. Firms with better-quality IR are also associated with higher investor loyalty and appear to have attracted significantly more institutional investors over the crisis period. This suggests that a firm’s IR contributes to value generation by enhancing credibility with shareholders and by diversifying its shareholder base. After decomposing IR into public and private transmission channels, we find the private IR function to be the main driver of our results.