This paper studies how division managers' access to venture capital (VC) markets affects the internal capital allocation decision of a multi-division firm. Division managers may leave firms and seek venture financing if their project ideas are not funded by headquarters. A successful new venture...

When a firm has minimal agency and informational asymmetry problems it should make efficient capital budgeting decisions. Many firms over-invest prior to CEO turnover, halt investments in the period surrounding the turnover, and then greatly increase their level of expenditures. Empirical...

We examine how division managers' human capital affects internal capital allocation using a hand-collected data set of divisional managers at S&P 1,500 firms. Based on a novel measure of division-manager ability, we show that more able division managers receive substantially larger capital...

Using a unique 10-year panel that includes more than 13,300 expected stock market return probability distributions, we find that executives are severely miscalibrated, producing distributions that are too narrow: realized market returns are within the executives' 80% confidence intervals only...

This paper studies how biases in managerial beliefs affect managerial decisions, firm performance, and the macroeconomy. Using a new survey of US managers I establish three facts. (1) Managers are not over-optimistic: sales growth forecasts on average do not exceed realizations. (2) Managers are...

We present a selection of seminar slides based on our 2013 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper, "https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1640552" Managerial Miscalibration. Using a large panel of CFO forecasts of S&P 500 returns, we find that executives are severely miscalibrated,...

This paper analyzes how CEO turnover affects successive CEOs' financial reporting decisions and the capital market price. I show that when an outgoing CEO (O) in period 1 is succeeded by an incoming CEO (N) in period 2, strategic interaction between O and N leads to interlinked earnings reports....

Financial restatements are costly, but frequent, events and many firms restate several times. This paper asks why rational managers engage in misreporting, in spite of the costly consequences. We present a simple extension to the Fischer and Verrecchia (2000) model, which provides testable...

We consider a setting in which insiders have information about income that outside shareholders do not, but property rights ensure that outside shareholders can enforce a fair payout. To avoid intervention, insiders report income consistent with outsiders' expectations based on publicly...

We examine a dynamic model of voluntary disclosure of multiple pieces of private information. In our model, a manager of a firm who may learn multiple signals over time interacts with a competitive capital market and maximizes payoffs that increase in both period prices. We show (perhaps...