From 1988 to 2003, the average change in managerial ownership is significantly negative every year for American firms. The probability of large decreases in ownership is strongly increasing in contemporaneous and past stock returns but the probability of large increases in ownership through...

Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...