We show that managerial overconfidence, which has been found to influence a number of corporate financial decisions, also affects corporate risk management. We find that managers increase their speculative activities using derivatives following speculative gains, while they do not reduce their...

The registration date of a seasoned equity offering marks the beginning of the offering process and serves to galvanize further scrutiny and information gathering about the issuer. We posit that the market reaction to this new additional information influences issuers' decisions about their...

The literature on managerial style posits a linear relation between a CEO's past experiences and firm risk. We show that there is a non-monotonic relation between the intensity of CEOs' early-life exposure to fatal disasters and corporate risk-taking. CEOs who experience fatal disasters without...

Governance at banks, especially major banks, requires further reform, especially with respect to incentives. Supervisors are concerned that incentives may make executives prone to take “excessive” risks. Shareholders are concerned that banks rarely earn their cost of capital.What's needed is...

We examine the impact of managerial characteristics on the choice of risk-decreasing and risk-increasing/-constant strategies. Using unique data on firm-, year-, and currency-specific FX exposure before and after hedging with corresponding hedging instruments, we are able to measure how much a...

This paper investigates the impact of CEOs' career experiences on corporate investment decisions. We hypothesize that CEOs with more diverse career experiences are less likely to be constrained by insufficient internal capital. The potential mechanism is that rich external experiences help CEOs...

We examine whether managerial overconfidence can help explain the observed discrepancies between the theory and practice of corporate risk management. We use a unique dataset of corporate derivatives positions that enables us to directly observe managerial reactions to their (speculative) gains...

The literature on managerial style posits a linear relation between a CEO's past experiences and firm risk. We show that there is a non-monotonic relation between the intensity of CEOs' early-life exposure to fatal disasters and corporate risk-taking. CEOs who experience fatal disasters without...

We study the initiation effect of credit default swaps on CEOs performance-sensitive compensation and shareholder value. We find that the initiation effect of CDS contracts on CEO’s delta varies by the characteristics of firms. Firms with higher R&D and intangibles reduce CEO’s delta whereas...