We examine (i) whether the business practices of Berkshire Hathaway investees are consistent with Warren Buffett's public statements on what constitutes good accounting, governance and investing practices and (ii) whether these practices are associated with Berkshire's initial “selection” or...

Is shareholder interest in corporate social responsibility driven by pecuniary motives (abnormal rates of return) or non-pecuniary ones (willingness to sacrifice returns to address various firm externalities)? To answer this question, we categorize the literature into seven tests: (1) costs of...

We calculate optimal portfolio choices for a long-horizon, risk-averse investor who diversifies amongEuropean stocks, bonds, real estate, and cash, when excess asset returns are predictable. Simulations areperformed for scenarios involving different risk aversion levels, horizons, and...

Topics on behavioral corporate finance are concerned with the consequences ofboundedly rational investors for optimal financial decisions by firm management. Aspects ofbounded rationality are relevant both for the theory and the practice of corporate finance. Onthe one hand, a new kind of...

We apply cumulative prospect theory and hedonic framing to evaluate discountreverse convertibles (DRCs) and reverse convertible bonds (RCBs) as important examples ofstructured products from a boundedly rational investor’s point of view. While commonexpected utility theory would also conclude...

We examine a certain class of new financial instruments which are designed aslotteries on the outcome of prominent sports events like the Soccer World Cup 2006. We areable to explain why there might be a positive demand for such sports-related financialinstruments even if we take riskless...

We extend the continuous Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) by considering piecewise con-tinuous distributions with a finite number of jump discontinuities. Such distributions are rele-vant in practice, for example, within the framework of financial engineering since cash flow distributions of...

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...

Equity research analysts tend to cover firms about which they have favorable views. We exploit this tendency to infer analysts' preferences for corporate policies from their coverage decisions. We then use exogenous analyst disappearances to examine the effect of these preferences on corporate...

Using new data for the universe of firms covered in Amadeus, we reconstruct the portfolios of shareholders who hold equity stakes in private and publicly-traded European firms. We find great heterogeneity in the degree of portfolio diversification across large shareholders. Exploiting this...