Current measures of financial literacy focus on knowledge, and the literature on financial literacy has described important findings about the extent and impact of limited financial knowledge across the population. This paper discusses issues associated with broadening the scope of the financial...

Entrepreneurs derive lower risk-adjusted returns than non-entrepreneurs, but are compensated through non-pecuniary benefits. This paper reports on findings from survey evidence. The main findings are as follows: A key non-pecuniary benefit to entrepreneurs is achieving greater control over their...

To date, scholars working in the area of behavioral finance have mostly focused on asset pricing and portfolio theory, but less so in corporate finance. In this paper, I propose a conceptual framework for applying behavioral ideas to the main topics which comprise corporate finance, and call the...

Managers and corporate directors need to recognize two key behavioral impediments that obstruct the process of value maximization, one internal to the firm and the other external. I call the first obstruction behavioral costs. Behavioral costs, like agency costs, tend to prevent value creation....

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...

Regulators charged with monitoring systemic risk need to focus on sentiment as well as narrowly defined measures of systemic risk. This chapter describes techniques for jointly monitoring the co-evolution of sentiment and systemic risk. To measure systemic risk, we use Marginal Expected...

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...

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...

Many people believe the yield enhancement produced by covered options writing is the trading world's version of a free lunch. ...The writer of the call option agrees to sell a portion of the future upside appreciation of a long stock position; in exchange, the writer gains a one-time cash...