Little is known about why CEOs voluntarily purchase shares of their firm other than because they expect to directly profit from doing so. However, since CEOs are risk-averse, highly un-diversified, and face litigation costs from trading on favorable private information, direct profits are...

We study the impact of endogenous shocks driven by collective actions of managers. We analyze how such endogenous shocks impact social welfare by employing an overlapping-generations model. We first prove that the competitive equilibrium allocation is suboptimal because of the externalities in...

One principle use of budgets is to elicit private information from subordinates in order to allow superiors to make better decisions. However, self-interested subordinates may bias their budget reports for personal gain, thus reducing the value of their budget reports to superiors. We examine...

This paper quantifies the economic costs of distortions in managerial forecasts. We match a unique managerial survey run by the Bank of Italy with administrative data on firm balance sheets and income statements. The resulting dataset allows us to observe a long panel of managerial forecast...

In contrast to the recent past, there is now widespread concern about the apparent excesses of some pay structures in corporate businesses. Top pay has risen much faster than average levels of pay in the last twenty years. This is in part the consequence of globalisation and developments in...

How can office-seeking politicians or managers be aligned with social welfare or firm welfare, given that such agents have a suboptimal incentive to cater to majority preferences in situations with low participation costs and to elite preferences in situations with high participation costs? In...

We study the GDPR's opt-in requirement in a model with a firm that provides a digital service and consumers who are heterogeneous in their valuations of the firm's service as well as the privacy costs incurred when sharing personal data with the firm. We show that the GDPR boosts demand for the...

This paper investigates the effect of superstar CEOs on their competitors. Exploiting shocks to CEO status due to prestigious media awards, we document a significant positive stock market performance of competitors of superstar CEOs subsequent to the award. The effect is more pronounced for...

The aim of this paper is to explore the determinants of firm investment decision under the manager’s psychological characteristic. Previous research investigating the relationship between overconfidence and financial decisions has studied investment, financing decisions and firm values....