We show that, after the revelation of corporate fraud in a state, household stock market participation in that state decreases. Households decrease holdings in fraudulent as well as nonfraudulent firms, even if they do not hold stocks in fraudulent firms. Within a state, households with more lifetime experience of corporate fraud hold less equity. Following the exogenous increase in fraud revelation due to Arthur Andersen's demise, states with more Arthur Andersen clients experience a larger decrease in stock market participation. We provide evidence that the documented effect is likely to reflect a loss of trust in the stock market.

We examine how a firm's incentive to commit fraud when going public varies with investor beliefs about industry business conditions. Fraud propensity increases with the level of investor beliefs about industry prospects but decreases when beliefs are extremely high. We find that two mechanisms are at work: monitoring by investors and short‐term executive compensation, both of which vary with investor beliefs about industry prospects. We also find that monitoring incentives of investors and underwriters differ. Our results are consistent with models of investor beliefs and corporate fraud, and suggest that regulators and auditors should be vigilant for fraud during booms.

We examine equity markets’ reaction to the first‐time disclosure of the CEO‐worker pay ratio by U.S. public companies in 2018. We find that firms disclosing higher pay ratios experience significantly lower abnormal announcement returns. Firms whose shareholders are more inequality‐averse experience a more negative market response to high pay ratios. Furthermore, during 2018 more inequality‐averse investors rebalance their portfolios away from stocks with a high pay ratio relative to other investors. Our results suggest that equity markets are concerned about high within‐firm pay dispersion, and investors’ inequality aversion is a channel through which high pay ratios negatively affect firm value.