Using a novel text-based measure of top management team diversity, covering over 70,000 top executives in over 6,500 U.S. firms from 1999 to 2014, we show that analyst forecasts are systematically more pessimistic for firms with more diverse top management teams ("diverse firms"), especially for...

This paper provides novel evidence suggesting that securities class action lawsuits, a central pillar of the U.S. litigation and corporate governance system, can constitute an obstacle to valuable corporate innovation. We first establish that valuable innovation output makes firms particularly...

In the standard regression of bidder announcement returns (ACARs) on bidder size in US data from 1981-2014, the coefficient on bidder size is positive and significant (0.5, t = 3.9) when the target is a public firm, where the average ACAR is negative (−1.4%); but it is negative and significant...

Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) can explain the variance premium puzzle. We solve a simple equilibrium model with CPT investors and find that probability weighting plays a key role in generating a substantial variance premium, while loss aversion captures the equity premium. Using GMM on a...

Top management team diversity matters for stock returns. We develop a new text–based measure of team diversity and apply it to a sample of over 40,000 top executives in U.S. firms from 2001 to 2014. Buying firms with diverse teams and selling firms with homogenous teams — a strategy we call...

We develop a tractable equilibrium asset pricing model with Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) preferences. Using GMM on a sample of U.S. equity index option returns, we show that by introducing a single common probability weighting parameter for both tails of the return distribution, the CPT...

Learning by doing matters for professional investors. We develop a new methodology to show that mutual fund managers outperform in industries where they have obtained experience on the job. The key to our identification strategy is that we look "inside'' funds and exploit heterogeneity in...

Do behavioral biases of executives matter for corporate investment decisions? Using segment-level capital allocation in multi-segment firms ("conglomerates") as a laboratory, we show that capital expenditure is increasing in the expected skewness of segment returns. Conglomerates invest more in...

From 1987 to 2008, riskier firms were more likely to be taken over. Yet, on average, the acquirer declined in value by 2.8% when it bought a "risky target" (the third tercile, having an annualized idiosyncratic volatility of 61% or more), but only by 0.6% when it bought a "safe target" (the...