PurposeThis study aims to investigate the impact of institutional investors distraction on firms' choice between bank debt and public debt.Design/methodology/approachThe study employs the measure of institutional investors distraction from Kempf et al. (2017), which captures exogenous attention-grabbing events in other aspects of institutional investors' portfolios holdings to examine this research question. The study uses a sample of 16,047 firm-year observations comprising 2,521 US firms for the period of 2000–2016.FindingsThe result shows a significant positive association between institutional shareholder distraction and firms' bank ratio. Cross-sectional tests show that the positive association between institutional shareholders distraction and firms' bank ratio is stronger for firms in poorer information environments and for firms facing greater competitive threats from rivals.Originality/valueThis study underscores the important governance role played by institutional shareholders and the consequence when such a monitoring role is impaired. In particular, firms with distracted shareholders rely on expensive bank monitoring and scrutiny to supply their additional monitoring capacity.

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