Investors have too often extrapolated from recent experience. In the 1950s, who but the most rampant optimist would have dreamt that over the next fifty years the real return on equities would be 9% per year? Yet this is what happened in the U.S. stock market. The optimists triumphed. However,...

We examine the impact of CEO-related sexual misconduct on U.S. firms’ stock market value in the #MeToo era. Our findings suggest that investors react negatively to corporate sexual misconduct, meaning that misbehaving CEOs cause significant damage to their shareholders’ wealth. On average,...

In this paper, we construct a novel measure of nepotism and explore its implications for firm value. We document that 35% of U.S. public firms employ relatives in top jobs. Using our measure, we show that nepotism decreases firm value: high-nepotism stocks underperform low-nepotism stocks by...