Initial public offering (IPO) underpricing is positively correlated with managerial confidence. We hypothesize that highly overconfident managers, who tend to overvalue their own firm, use underpricing to signal their beliefs to the market in an effort to receive greater value for their shares...

We show analytically and empirically that the positive abnormal returns from Betting-Against-Beta (BAB) – a beta-neutral portfolio long in low beta stocks and short in high beta stocks – are consistent with market segmentation due to costly information acquisition, as in Merton (1987)....

Motivated by studies that show overconfident agents are more competitive, we test whether overconfident CEOs respond differently and perform better when competition increases. Using tariff reductions as exogenous shocks to competition and a triple-difference specification on matched samples, we...