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 show that productivity at both the firm and employee (i.e., analyst and inventor) level temporarily declines upon announcements of takeover rumors that do not materialize. Such speculative news may hurt productivity because uncertainty and the threat of job loss cause anxiety, distraction, and reduced commitment among employees and managers. Consistently, we observe a more pronounced productivity dip for rumored targets and when the likelihood of job loss is higher. Firm performance mirrors these results. We find no indication of reverse causality. The evidence fosters our understanding of potential real effects of speculative financial news and the costs of takeover threats.

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.