We explore the role of cultural heritage in explaining CEOs overconfidence and its impact on the propensity and performance of corporate acquisitions. CEOs are more prone to overconfidence if the culture in their ancestral country of origin is characterized by strong individualism, independence,...

I consider the optimal contract for an overconfident manager in a principal-agent model with moral hazard where the contract is written on the earnings of the firm. Overconfidence causes the manager to overestimate his ability to affect the outcome of the firm. Overconfidence first reduces cost...

What drives mergers and acquisitions decisions? Can an overconfidence bias affect decisions within the management team? This study complements recent work developed within the behavioral finance analyses of Mergers & Acquisitions and proposes the use of new variable to measure overconfidence....

This paper investigates the effects of credit rating downgrades, equity mispricing and CEO overconfidence on zero-leverage policy, using data for listed United States firms during the period 1980-2012. The results show that (1) the likelihood of zero-leverage increases significantly following a...

We explore the possibility of using CEOs' social media messages to measure their personality. We use independent observers to measure CEOs' perceived personality based on the popular Big Five personality model. We use M&A initiations to validate the quality of our Big Five personality measures....

Using experimental data from a sample of 1,800 participants, we show that the Big Five personality traits have significant explanatory power to predict participants’ willingness to default on a mortgage. We identify a cluster of personality traits that matches the Self-Centered type in...