We consider the problem of motivating privately informed managers to engage in entrepreneurial activity to improve the quality of the firm's investment opportunities. The firm's investment and compensation policy must balance the manager's incentives to provide entrepreneurial effort and to...

We consider optimal capital allocation and managerial compensation mechanisms for decentralized firms when division managers have an incentive to misrepresent project quality and to minimize privately costly but value-enhancing effort. We show that in the optimal mechanism firms always under...

We consider a firm with two investment projects (divisions) each run by a manager who can provide (i) (unverifiable) information about the quality of either or both projects and (ii) (unverifiable) access to valuable resources that can enhance the cash flows of either or both projects. We then...

We consider the problem of motivating privately informed managers to engage in entrepreneurial activity to improve the quality of the firm's investment opportunities. The firm's investment and compensation policy must balance the manager's incentives to provide entrepreneurial effort and to...

We develop a model where overconfident investors overestimate their own signal quality but are skeptical of others'. Those investors who are initially uninformed believe that the early informed have learned little, leading the former investors to provide excess liquidity, which, in turn, causes...

High levels of turnover in financial markets are consistent with the notion that trading, like gambling, yields direct utility to some agents. We show that the presence of these agents attenuates covariance risk pricing and volatility, and implies a negative relation between volume and future...

We analyze a model with information asymmetry where owning stock confers direct utility, in addition to impacting wealth. In contrast to settings based on wealth considerations alone, expected stock prices deviate from expected fundamentals even when assets are in zero net supply. Stocks that...

We show that the migration of low-skilled, rural workers to urban centers has a negative causal effect on innovation of firms in such urban centers. Our tests exploit the staggered relaxation of city-level household registration system in China, which facilitates rural residents to migrate to...

We consider a setting where owning stock confers direct utility due to an affect heuristic. Specifically, holding equity in companies with visible brands or environmentally conscious products yields positive consumption benefits, whereas investing in sin stocks yields the reverse. We find that...

How might markets exhibit both short-term reversals and longer-term momentum? Motivated by this question, we develop a dynamic model which includes noise traders and investors who underreact to signals that they do not themselves produce. Our setting implies the following: Return predictability...