Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 August 2022
Upon the revelation of corporate misconduct by firms in their portfolios, institutional investors experience a significant discount in the market value of their portfolios, excluding misconduct firms, creating a short-term spillover that averages $92.7 billion losses per year. We examine an expansive set of channels under which this spillover to nontarget firms can occur, and find that it reflects the loss of the embedded value of monitoring by a common institutional owner, enforcement wave activity, and industry peer and business relationships. Institutional investors also experience a significant abnormal outflow of funds in the year following the misconduct event.
We acknowledge helpful comments from Jie (Jack) He, Mariesa Ho, Jonathan Karpoff, Steve Malliaris, Jeff Netter, Mattias Nilsson, Annette Poulsen, Albert Wang, and participants at the University of Georgia, 2020 Financial Management Association Meeting, and the 2018 US SEC Doctoral Student Symposium.