The parent company of Flagstar Bank raised its beaten-down stock price to a somewhat higher level Friday thanks to a financial facelift.

The struggling New York Community Bancorp reverse-split its stock, meaning investors who owned 1,000 shares before now hold 333, although their overall stake didn’t change. Shares traded at $11 each on the New York Stock Exchange this morning, up from about $3.50 yesterday.

NYCB, which was on the brink of failure four months ago before receiving a $1 billion private-capital infusion, said the reverse split “represents another milestone in our efforts to enhance shareholder value.”

The maneuver means the bank is no longer a “single-digit midget,” to borrow a phrase from Wall Street, and while the change is strictly cosmetic, appearances do matter.

“Although the stock split does not change anything fundamentally, we see a marginal benefit as some investors are barred from owning a stock if the share price sits below a certain level,” CFRA analyst Alexander Yokum said.

Yokum added NYCB still faces “outsized funding costs” and “talent attrition concerns.”

Reverse splits happen when companies desperately need to raise their stock price, either to spare themselves embarrassment or to keep their shares listed on an exchange.

Citigroup did a 1-for-10 reverse-split in 2011 to lift its shares out of penny-stock territory. AIG did a 1-for-20 in 2009. WeWork did a 1-for-40 split last year, shortly before sinking into Chapter 11.

A 2008 study of more than 1,600 reverse splits over 40 years showed companies that did them underperformed their peers by 50%. Companies going down this road, researchers found, “experience poor operating performances over the four years that include and follow the year of the reverse split.”