This paper investigates how the combination of preferences and biases impact the risk-value profile of acquiring firms. We find strong evidence that prior losses impact acquisition risk as firms with negative prior returns are more prone to become acquirers and make value destructive...

On the surface, cryptocurrencies share important features in common with high sentiment beta stocks. Baker and Wurgler (2007) identify high sentiment betas with small startup firms that have great growth potential. This paper investigates the degree to which, during the period July 18, 2010 to...

We estimate how an acquiring firm’s risk changes depending on whether the market initially judges the acquisition to be neutral, strongly negative, or strongly positive for the shareholders of the acquiring firm. We find that for an average neutral acquisition, the annualized standard...

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping many facets of the decision landscape faced by consumers and investors. These advances have resulted in lower fees and borrowing costs, increased access to financial services, and greater customization. In this paper, I discuss how the need...

Existing studies on individual investors' decision-making often rely on observable socio-demographic variables to proxy for underlying psychological processes that drive investment choices. Doing so implicitly ignores the latent heterogeneity amongst investors in terms of their preferences and...

Finance is in the midst of a paradigm shift, from a neoclassical based framework to a psychologically based framework. Behavioral finance is the application of psychology to financial decision making and financial markets. Behavioralizing finance is the process of replacing neoclassical...

The root cause of the financial crisis that erupted in 2008 is psychological. In the events which led up to the crisis, heuristics, biases, and framing effects strongly influenced the judgments and decisions of financial firms, rating agencies, elected officials, government regulators, and...

For 5,500 individual online investors we match survey records with recent trading data to investigate what they want, in terms of their stated objectives for investing, what they do, in terms of the broad investing strategies they employ, and how their portfolios perform in terms of risk,...

This paper examines corporate risk taking behavior in the wake of unsuccessful merger activities. We find that relative to other firms, firms that made bad acquisitions take both more systematic risk and more idiosyncratic risk. Moreover, higher risk is associated with greater value destruction...

A juxtaposition of the key ideas in Hyman Minsky's writings against passages from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission makes clear that Minsky's main ideas about economic instability were prescient. Nevertheless, Minsky did not provide a well defined model of his framework, which might be one...