To gain new and important insights into institutional herding, we study Japan for the following reasons: we can examine a market that is known for its active institutional investors, we can investigate the impacts of business grouping (i.e., the keiretsu), and we can see if herding and feedback...

Some U.S. politicians advocate policy to inhibit share repurchases. We can learn from corporate reaction to such a new policy in India. The Indian federal government recently levied a 20 percent tax, plus surcharge, on share repurchases. We show that companies did not slow down their share...

During a period where Japanese banks operated under a less restrictive regulatory environment, 1986-88, we find positive relationships between bank risk and ownership concentration. This empirical evidence reveals shareholder activism by the largest shareholders. During the periods immediately...

We find individuals are four times more likely to purchase stocks of their local direct utility company as opposed to utility companies operating outside their state of residence. Our tests reveal that individuals do not possess superior or private information about their local utilities....

When determining a stock to buy, Strahilevitz et al. (2011) demonstrate that individual investors often repurchase a stock previously traded for a profit as a learning process. When evaluating a decision, people use the most available information that comes to mind. We posit that the most...

Compared to conventional mutual funds, socially responsible mutual funds outperform during periods of market crisis. This dampening of downside risk comes at the cost of under performing during non-crisis periods. Investors with Prospect Theory utility functions would value the skewness of these...

We test the predictability of eighteen stock return predictors, including classic factors such as firm size, book-to-market, and momentum, along with other proposed predictors from firm-specific, corporate investment, financing, and stock characteristic anomalies. These predictors have power to...

The underlying physiological mechanisms of biases are not well understood. As such, we examine the impact of testosterone and cortisol levels on several commonplace investment biases using realistic trading simulations. Cortisol, the biological marker of stress, is positively related to the...

We examine the relation between minority shareholder protection laws, ownership concentration, and board independence. Minority shareholder rights is a country-level governance variable. Ownership structure and board composition represent firm-level governance variables. Prior research...