Purpose-The existence of optimism as a personal psychological characteristic of managers is a necessity in contemporary economy and decision making, although the phenomenon of over-optimism may lead to unfavourable outcomes. The purpose of this study is to examine the optimism bias and its...

We show that product differentiation reduces the informativeness of a firm's stock price (or its peers' stock prices) about the value of its growth opportunities. This results in less efficient exercise of a firm's growth options when managers rely on information in stock prices for their...

Using hand-collected data on divisional managers at conglomerates, we find that a change in industry surplus in one division generates large spillovers on managerial payoffs in other divisions of the same firm. These spillovers arise only within the boundaries of a conglomerate but not between...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of managerial optimism on corporate investment regarding the financially constrained firms for the case of Greece. Taking as a fact that managers principally are optimistic and often overconfident an effort is made to highlight the...

Investment cash flow sensitivity constitutes one important block of the corporate financial literature. While it is well documented in standard corporate finance, it is still young under behavioral corporate finance. In this paper, we test the investment cash flow sensitivity among panel data of...

This study tries to extend previous works on behavioral corporate finance by examining the interaction between investment cash flow sensitivity and various CEO characteristics in either the existence or inexistence of managerial optimism. Using a Q-investment model and departing from a sample of...

Institutional investors pay considerable attention to the quality of a company's governance. Unfortunately, it is difficult for outside observers to reliably gauge governance quality. Oftentimes, poor governance manifests itself only after decisions have been made and their outcomes known. We...

In this paper we offer an alternative framework for examining why risk matters in the decisions of economic agents, and how the agent’s risk attitude affects his decisions. This “Threshold Theory” framework is based on a real options approach and the observation that in many situations an...

We study how managers respond to hurricane events when their firms are located in the neighborhood of the disaster area. We find that the sudden shock to the perceived liquidity risk leads managers to increase corporate cash holdings and to express more concerns about hurricane risk in...