Corporate Actions as Moral Issues

Abstract

We examine nonpecuniary preferences across a broad set of corporate actions using a representative sample of the U.S. population. Our core findings, based on large-scale online surveys, are that (i) self-reported nonpecuniary concerns are large both for stock market investors and non-investors; (ii) concerns about the treatment of workers and CEO pay rank highest—higher than concerns about workforce diversity and fossil energy usage; (iii) Moral Foundations Theory emerges as an important framework for explaining nonpecuniary preferences. Combined, our findings provide new evidence on the importance of moral values as a key determinant of nonpecuniary preferences over corporate actions.