New York State is one of the financial capitals of the world, and individual consumers of banking services have a wide range of commercial banks to choose from, all of which provide a dizzying array of products and services. With the details of many of these products and services buried in the...

Financially constrained borrowers have the incentive to influence the appraisal process in order to increase borrowing or reduce the interest rate. We document that the average valuation bias for residential refinance transactions is above 5%. The bias is larger for highly leveraged...

The disposition effect is regarded as a property of an individual stock: If an investor has made a loss on a stock, he or she is less likely to sell it, whereas if an investor has made a gain on a stock, he or she is more likely to sell it. This means that the more stocks in a portfolio are in...

The thoughts and behaviors of financial market participants depend upon adopted cultural traits, including information signals, beliefs, strategies, and folk economic models. Financial traits compete to survive in the human population, and are modified in the process of being transmitted from...

<p>Biased information about the payoffs received by others can drive innovation, risk-taking, and investment booms. We study this cultural phenomenon using a model based on two premises. The first premise is a tendency for large successes, and the actions that lead to them, to be more salient to...</p>

Because positive spillovers give investment in innovation a social rate of return several times higher than its internal rate of return to innovators, innovation is chronically underfunded. Recurrent manias, panics, and crashes in stock markets inundate “hot” new technologies with capital....

We study the demand for government participation in China’s venture capital and private equity market. We conduct a large-scale, non-deceptive field experiment in collaboration with the leading industry service provider, through which we survey both sides of the market: the capital investors...

We study the demand for government participation in China's venture capital and private equity market. We conduct a large-scale, non-deceptive field experiment in collaboration with the leading industry service provider, through which we survey both sides of the market: the capital investors and...

Instructional presentation slides.What drives innovation, risk taking, and investment booms? We study these phenomena using a model of decision making by firms that make biased observations of prior returns. We assume that firms are more likely to observe large successes than small successes or...

A war-related factor model derived from textual analysis of media news reports explains the cross section of expected asset returns. Using a semi-supervised topic model to extract discourse topics from 7,000,000 New York Times stories spanning 160 years, the war factor predicts the cross section...