Measures of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) excess compensation are negatively related to future firm returns and operating performance. The effect is stronger for more overconfident CEOs at firms with weaker corporate governance. Overconfident CEOs receiving high excess pay undertake activities...

We propose that fitted values from market-wide regressions of firm returns on lagged firm characteristics provide useful benchmarks for assessing whether average returns to certain stocks are abnormal. To illustrate, we study eight events where abnormal returns have been documented, including...

We show that characteristics known to predict returns to U.S. stocks also predict returns for a broad sample of nearly 52,000 stocks from fifty-eight non-U.S. countries, and we evaluate the extent to which six prominent corporate events, including initial and secondary stock offerings, stock...