Entrepreneurial Overconfidence, Self-Financing and Capital Market Efficiency

We study the impact of entrepreneurial optimism on self-nancing and capital market efficiency in a setting where entrepreneurs are better informed about the quality of their projects than investors. Projects have either low- or high-quality. Entrepreneurs use self-finance to signal the perceived quality of their projects. Investors observe self-financing decisions and know the fractions of high-quality projects, realistic and optimistic entrepreneurs. We show that entrepreneurial optimism improves capital market efficiency when the returns of high-quality projects have a high variance, entrepreneurs' have high absolute risk aversion, and the gap between the mean returns of high- and low-quality projects is small.