The devastating events that beset financial markets in the summer of 2007 led to a huge contraction in global economic output and left the financial and banking systems in the core economies of the United Kingdom, United States and Europe on the brink of destruction. The ensuing fallout from...

I test theories of the recent financial crisis by studying how banks' pre-crisis investments connect to their CEOs' beliefs. Using different proxies for beliefs, I find banks with larger housing investments and worse crisis performance had CEOs who were more optimistic ex ante. Banks with the...