The "headquarters curse" — the idea that the moment a company starts planning a fancy new headquarters is the moment for smart investors to start bailing out of its stock — is being given new currency by events here in New York.

The most recent example is Bear Stearns, which, according to the Web site of Good Jobs New York, a group that opposes special subsidy deals for businesses, was granted $75 million in tax breaks by the Giuliani administration in 1997 to build a new 1.1 million square foot world headquarters at 383 Madison Avenue, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Bear's medium-range performance since moving has been strong, but over the last year, the bank has lost more than 90% of its value, with its stock price plummeting from $170 a share to the $10 a share that J.P. Morgan is now offering.

But Bear is only one of many examples of this curse. Take IAC Interactive, a company chaired by Barry Diller whose businesses include Ticketmaster, the online dating site match.com, evite, and LendingTree. Last summer, the company moved into fancy, Frank Gehry-designed headquarters at West 18th Street and 11th Avenue, a building subsidized by the federal taxpayers with $80 million in tax-exempt Liberty Bond financing from the New York City Industrial Development Agency. Over the past year, IAC's stock price has plummeted 50%, more than twice the decline in either the NASDAQ or the Standard & Poor's 500 Index.

When Time Warner Center opened at Columbus Circle in 2004, the company threw a big party to celebrate its new headquarters, which were, like those of Bear Stearns, designed by SOM. On the day of the party, Time Warner stock closed at $16.69 a share. Yesterday afternoon it was trading at about $14.40 a share. Its performance, too, has substantially lagged that of the S&P 500 Index.

The fourth and final local example of the "headquarters curse" is the New York Times Company, whose stock is off more than 50% during the past five years, a period during which the company's management and employees moved to a Renzo Piano-designed building near the Port Authority bus terminal that the Times's own architecture critic described as "a paradise" by comparison to the paper's longtime Times Square home.

It puts a new gloss on the choice by city and state board members of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority among the bidders to develop the West Side rail yards. Related's bid would have included a headquarters for News Corp. It may be that if the price of winning the West Side Yards was building a new headquarters tower, this was one competition that the company — and its shareholders — would be better off losing.