Overconfidence and overextrapolation are two behavioral biases that are pervasive in human thinking. A long line of research documents that such biases influence business decisions by distorting managers' expected productivity. We propose a new mechanism in which the biases change firms'...

This paper investigates two successive reforms in China -- 2001 board independence and 2005 share structure -- to study their joint effects on corporate performance as ownership concentration declines. We find that both independent directors and ownership concentration ratios are individually...

In this paper, we shed new light on the role of monetary policy in asset pricing by examining the case where investors have heterogeneous expectations about future monetary policy. This case is realistic, because central banks are typically less than perfectly open on their intentions....

We propose a two-country model with heterogeneous beliefs to understand the forward premium puzzle. Facing a shock to the domestic money supply, the disagreement between domestic and foreign investors shifts the relative wealth of investors, which moves the exchange rate and interest rate...

This paper analyzes lenders' pricing strategies in the business-to-customer (B2C) unsecured loan market by using a proprietary dataset of approximately 3 million unsecured consumer loans from a B2C online retailer in China. We find that lenders' decisions to invite customers are based on...

We present evidence that market sentiment is positively priced in the cross-section of stock returns in low-sentiment periods. We estimate individual stock exposure to market sentiment and find that, in periods of low market sentiment, stocks in the highest sentiment beta quintile generate a...