This paper explores two broad questions on collaboration between individuals. First, we investigate what personal characteristics affect people's desire to work together. Second, given the influence of these personal characteristics, we analyze whether this attraction enhances or detracts from...

Do financial advisers undo or reinforce the behavioral biases and misconceptions of their clients? We use an audit methodology where trained auditors meet with financial advisers and present different types of portfolios. These portfolios reflect either biases that are in line with the financial...

Limits to arbitrage play a central role in behavioral finance. They are thought to interfere with arbitrage processes so that security prices can deviate from true values for extended periods of time. We describe a recent financial innovation that allows limits to arbitrage to be sidestepped,...

Minimum capital requirements are a central tool of banking regulation. Setting them balances a number of factors, including any effects on the cost of capital and in turn the rates available to borrowers. Standard theory predicts that, in perfect and efficient capital markets, reducing banks'...

A basic tenet of financial economics is that asset prices change in response to unexpected fundamental information. Since Roll's (1988) provocative presidential address that showed little relation between stock prices and news, however, the finance literature has had limited success reversing...

As illustrated in the tale of "the dog that did not bark," the absence of news and the passage of time often contain information. We test whether markets fully incorporate this information using the empirical context of mergers. During the year after merger announcement, the passage of time is...

In this paper we demonstrate that legislation has a simple, yet previously undetected impact on firm stock prices. While it is understood that the government and firms have an important relationship, it remains difficult to determine which firms any given piece of legislation will affect, and...

We provide empirical support for the conventional wisdom that there are times when optimistic investors tend to build their hopes into castles in the air, and pay a large premium over intrinsic value for stocks of firms in the early stages of their life cycles with perceived growth...

This paper uses the segmented dual-class shares issued by several dozen Chinese firms---A shares to local Chinese investors and H shares to foreign investors---to compare reactions of local and foreign investors to the same public news. We find that local investors react more strongly to...

Do acquirors profit from acquisitions, or do acquiring CEOs overbid and destroy shareholder value? We present a novel approach to estimating the long-run abnormal returns to mergers exploiting detailed data on merger contests. In the sample of close bidding contests, we use the loser's...