Experimental evidence suggests that people make time-inconsistent choices and display overconfidence about positive personal attributes. Do these features affect consumer behavior in the market? To address this question we use a new panel data set from three US health clubs with information on...

We argue that managerial overconfidence can account for corporate investment distortions. Overconfident managers overestimate the returns to their investment projects and view external funds as unduly costly. Thus, they overinvest when they have abundant internal funds, but curtail investment...

Compensation, status, and press coverage of managers in the U.S. follow a highly skewed distribution: a small number of 'superstars' enjoy the bulk of the rewards. We evaluate the impact of CEOs achieving superstar status on the performance of their firms, using prestigious business awards to...

Many financing choices of US corporations remain puzzling even after accounting for standard determinants such as taxes, bankruptcy costs, and asymmetric information. We propose that managerial beliefs help to explain the remaining variation across and within firms, including variation in debt...

We analyze how variations in contractibility affect the design of contracts in the context of biotechnology research agreements. A major concern of firms financing biotechnology research is that the R&D firms might use the funding to subsidize other projects or substitute one project for...

We show that measurable managerial characteristics have significant explanatory power for corporate financing decisions beyond traditional capital-structure determinants. First, managers who believe that their firm is undervalued view external financing as overpriced, especially equity. Such...

To what extent does "false science" impact the rate and direction of scientific change? We examine the impact of more than 1,100 scientific retractions on the citation trajectories of articles that are related to retracted papers in intellectual space but were published prior to the retraction...

In a market context, a status effect occurs when actors are accorded differential recognition for their efforts depending on their location in a status ordering, holding constant the quality of these efforts. In practice, because it is very difficult to measure quality, this ceteris paribus...

Scandals permeate social and economic life, but their consequences have received scant attention in the economics literature. To shed empirical light on this phenomenon, we investigate how the scientific community's perception of a scientist's prior work changes when one of his articles is...

We quantify the impact of scientific grant funding at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on patenting by pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms. Our paper makes two contributions. First, we use newly constructed bibliometric data to develop a method for flexibly linking specific grant...