Essays on stakeholder relations and firm value

This doctoral dissertation consists of three chapters on stakeholder relationships and firm value. The first chapter examines whether corporate social responsibility affects the relative pricing of equity and debt. The chapter shows that responsible firms have lower credit risk, and an arbitrage strategy exploiting short-term variations in credit and equity prices is also improved by taking corporate social responsibility into account. The second chapter turns to analyzing investor activism promoting corporate social responsibility. The chapter shows that activists can induce meaningful changes in targeted firms, and they can also increase their portfolio value through these actions. The last chapter studies firms’ propensity to commit fraud, and stock market reactions to revealed fraud. The main finding of this chapter is that markets heavily penalize fraud, even alleged wrongdoing is followed by large negative returns. Fraudulent companies subsequently readjust their longterm operations and follow a more conservative business plan.