Download or read book Two Essays in Behavioral Corporate Finance written by Cagri Berk Onuk and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two essays in my dissertation are broadly related to the behavior and decision-making of firm managers and directors, and how those variables are associated with firm outcomes and firms' relationship with investors. The first essay examines the disagreement within the executive team. The model shows the negative effect of disagreement on firm outcomes via executives' reduced effort and the positive effect via decision enhancement. In a novel manner, I identify disagreement through information-based insider trades in opposing directions. The outcome I analyze is firm investments including capital expenditures, acquisitions, and R&D expenses. I uncover negative effects of disagreement on capital expenditures, which is statistically and economically significant. Decision enhancing effects are measured as reduction in a firm's tendency to overinvest, but the results are weaker. Disagreement also hurts firm valuation especially when firms need quick decisions. Overall, disagreement is found to have more harmful than beneficial effects on firms. The second essay, coauthored with Orhan Erdem, examines the effect of piety on individual investor and corporate decision-making, and on the interactions between the two types of agents. We use Turkey as our experimental setting, where piety is likely to have an important effect on financial outcomes due to the country's unique political and religious background. We have proprietary individual investor trading data for a random sample of 25,000 investors, and importantly, we have a number of strong identifiers for investor piety. One of them is a binary variable that indicates whether investors are trading through an Islamic brokerage house. Similarly, we have a few strong variables capturing firm piety. One such variable identifies whether firm executives are affiliated with a secular or a conservative executive club. Our results indicate that religious investors display conservative trading behavior, in particular, they display less overconfidence and higher local bias. Results on firms indicate that apparently religious firms grow their assets faster and are highly valued but have lower operating profitability. We also find that upon events that stir religious sentiment in the country, conservative investors increase their holdings of apparently religious firms.

Download or read book Essays in Behavioral Corporate Finance written by Hui Zheng and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores the extent to which managerial overconfidence affects corporate decisions. This analysis includes three essays, which address a wide range of corporate decisions including financing, investment, acquisition, innovation, liquidity management and advertising decisions. The first essay introduces a fine-tuned test of the relationship between managerial overconfidence and corporate decisions by taking the chief financial officer (CFO) overconfidence effect into account. Ex-ante, I identify financial policies and non-financial policies such as investment, innovation and acquisition as the primary managerial duties of CFOs and chief executive officers (CEOs) respectively. I construct overconfidence measures for both CEOs and CFOs and test the impact of CEO and CFO overconfidence, both on financial decisions and on nonfinancial decisions. Based on a sample of 1,173 S & P 1500 firms, I find that financial policies are primarily affected by CFO overconfidence while only CEO overconfidence affects nonfinancial decisions. My findings demonstrate that managerial biases affect corporate decisions and managerial duties shape the ways in which top managers influence corporate policies. The second essay investigates how overconfident CEOs allocate resources toward innovation activities. It argues that overconfident CEOs tend to have greater innovation input. To finance innovation, they save more cash out of the cash flow and spend more on innovation when the cash flow is high. Results from an empirical analysis of 1,015 S & P 1500 firms support this argument. Moreover, based on a series of financial constraint measurements, the effect of CEO overconfidence on liquidity management is found to be more pronounced in financially constrained firms and in highly innovative firms, but not in firms without financial constraints. With regards to innovation performance, overconfident CEOs tend to have more patents, but the overall quality of their patents is not significantly better than that of rational CEOs. The third essay introduces a simple model of firm advertising behavior in monopolistic competition industries and applies it to the situation of managerial overconfidence. The model shows that the optimal advertising to sales ratio is determined by both firm advertising competency and consumer preference. Overconfident CEOs are more willing to use advertising as a means to convey the quality of their firms and products. Such overestimation of the effects of advertising by overconfident CEOs will result in overspending on advertising. When financially constrained, an overconfident CEO's tendency to overspend will be curbed to some extent, but his amount of advertising will increase with cash flows. An empirical analysis of 654 S & P 1500 firms supports these predictions. The distorted effect of managerial overconfidence is more prominent when firms are financially constrained and when the overconfidence measure is continuous.

Download or read book Essays in Behavioral Corporate Finance written by Geoffrey A. Tate and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Behavioral Finance and Corporate Finance written by Lingbo Shen and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Behavioral Corporate Finance written by Mi Shen and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the behavioral traits of business executives that lead to financial misconduct. The first essay investigates whether executives act more honestly when ethical considerations are made to stand out in an obvious way. In behavioral experiments, individuals are less likely to cheat when the saliency of dishonesty is increased (Mazar et al. 2008; Gino et al. 2009). We test this hypothesis in a real world setting by treating news about high-profile political scandals as shocks to the salience of unethical/illegal behavior. Analyzing corporate insiders' stock trading activity, we find evidence of a reduction in inappropriate behavior during these periods. Insiders' stock sales are less profitable and they are less likely to sell stock ahead of large price declines, suggesting less illegal insider trading. The results are concentrated in months with high levels of local media attention to political scandals, supporting an interpretation that the salience of these events affects insiders' behavior. The relation is also stronger when an executives' firm is aligned politically with the accused politician, suggesting that a scandal is more salient to “in-group” executives. However, the behavioral changes appear to be largely transitory and evidence of suspect trading resumes in subsequent years. The second essay examines the effect of envy on executive misbehavior. We provide evidence that envy can lead to executive misbehavior in the form of insider trading. Insiders at underperforming firms headquartered where more other firms are performing well demonstrate greater evidence of informed insider trading. Their stock trades generate higher abnormal returns, and they are more likely to sell stock ahead of a large price decline. We find similar evidence of profitable insider sales when CEOs suffer large pay gaps from their local peers. Envy motivated trading is more apparent in locations where household give less to charities, which may indicate higher levels of greed on average.

Download or read book Essays in Behavioral and Corporate Finance written by Tomas Hernan Reyes Torres and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the factors that influence investors' attention to the stock market and the relationship that exists among attention and real output variables including stock returns, trading volume, and volatility. Traditional asset pricing models assume that information is effortlessly obtained and instantaneously incorporated into pricing. This assumption requires that investors devote sufficient attention to the asset, and ignores the existence of various channels through which public information is disseminated. In reality, attention is a scarce cognitive resource which is related to the effort that investors must expend to obtain information; the implications of this contingency of attention on these limitations have been remarkably under-researched in the past. In the first chapter of this study, I familiarize readers with Google Trends data and explain why such data is a better source to proxy for attention than the measures previously used in the literature. Next, utilizing this data, I describe how to measure investors' attention with regard to M\&A announcements, and show that attention is not instantaneous with the release of information, but is, instead, spread over a period surrounding the announcement. Retail investors pay attention and demand information about a firm as the announcement date approaches, during the announcement, and for days afterward. Finally, I present three aggregate measures of attention in the stock market, which are also based on search volume from Google. After constructing these measures, I study how they correlate with, but differ from, existing proxies of attention. In the second chapter, I consider whether limited attention explains the announcement effect bias found in the M\&A literature concerning merger and acquisition announcements. More specifically, I ask: How does variation in investors' attention affect the capital market response to M\&A announcements? To answer this question I rely on the measure for attention to M\&A announcements described in the previous chapter and find that high abnormal attention on the day of announcement predicts high adjusted abnormal returns the day after. This effect is strongest among firms with high standard deviations and betas, and it partially reverses over the following months. The third chapter argues that negative stock market performance attracts more attention from retail investors than comparable positive performance. Specifically, I rely on the three aggregate measures of attention in the stock market to test and confirm the hypothesis that retail investors pay more attention to negative rather than positive extreme returns. Empirical results strongly support that with respect to stock returns investors display this negativity bias in attention allocation. Across all specifications, lagged negative extreme returns are stronger predictors than positive extreme returns of high attention at the stock and market level. I rule out that negative returns are stronger simply because they are more unusual or because negative and positive returns are not symmetrical events to stockholders.

Download or read book Behavioural Corporate Finance written by Júlio Lobão and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orthodox financial theory often ignores the role played by managers’ personal characteristics in their decision-making processes. However, as anyone with experience in the business world knows, managers’ personalities are crucial in the choices they make. Indeed, it should be noted that firms do not make decisions, rather it is the managers who decide – either as a group or individually. This book explores the impact of managers’ psychological profiles and life experiences on their financial decisions, taking the following key questions as starting points: Why do they commit mistakes? Why do they contract debt and issue shares? How do they choose the right amount of dividends to distribute? Why do they acquire other firms? Why do they sometimes choose to manipulate information and to commit fraud? As the book highlights, having insights into managers’ psychology is essential to understanding their choices and predicting decisions made by competing firms.

Download or read book Essays in Behavioral Finance and Corporate Finance written by Bradley J. Cannon and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters that study how psychology impacts stock prices and how stock prices then impact corporate decisions. In the first chapter, I study whether a firm’s investment responds to the stock valuations of other firms headquartered nearby. I document a positive relation between a firm’s investment and the valuation of neighboring firms. This relation is stronger among financially constrained firms and is robust to controlling for the actual investment of other firms in the region. These findings are difficult to reconcile with traditional theories that link investment opportunities to firm valuations, but instead suggest that the ability of firms to raise external finance rises and falls with the stock valuations of other firms located nearby. Consistent with this explanation, I document that financially constrained firms issue more debt and receive more trade credit when neighboring firms have high stock valuations. In the second chapter, I test models of return extrapolation in the cross-section of stock returns. Return extrapolation is a biased belief structure that has received considerable attention because of its ability to generate prominent empirical findings in the asset pricing literature, while also being able to match investor beliefs. I document that return extrapolation is not uniform across firms but is instead more prevalent among firms that do not pay dividends (capital-gain firms). Specifically, analyst return expectations are positively related to past annual returns for capital-gain firms but show no relation among dividend-paying firms. I exploit this difference in extrapolative expectations to test asset pricing predictions stemming from models of return extrapolation. Consistent with return extrapolation models, I show that the value premium and long-term reversal are stronger among capital-gain firms. Momentum, however, is stronger among dividend-paying firms and, consequently, does not appear to be a result of return extrapolation. In the third chapter, co-authored with Hannes Mohrschladt, we test whether reference prices impact how investors respond to news. When current prices are farther from a reference price, investors react more strongly to news. We first document that individual investors are more (less) likely to sell a stock following bad (good) news when the stock's trading price is farther from the investor's purchase price. Motivated by this micro-level evidence, we construct a stock-level measure to capture the distance between a stock's trading price and its purchase price for the average investor. We provide evidence that this distance from purchase price produces a substantial amount of cross-sectional variation in the degree to which stocks over- or underreact to news. Stocks trading farthest from their purchase price react more strongly to news than stocks trading near their purchase price. Consistent with relative overreaction, stocks trading farthest from their purchase price also exhibit greater return reversal following news days. We document that a cross-sectional strategy exploiting these return patterns earns a monthly alpha of 0.93%. These findings are distinct from alternative explanations related to size, illiquidity, and volatility. Our evidence instead suggests that reference prices have a meaningful impact on how investors respond to news.

Download or read book Two Essays on Behavioral Finance written by Quang Viet Vu and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Behavioral Finance written by Michael Young and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last two decades, there has been a significant increase in research related to behavioral finance. As Barberis and Thaler (2002) point out, there are two main aspect of behavioral finance: limits to arbitrage and the effects of psychology. My dissertation will focus on the second aspect, the effects of psychology on individual investor behavior. The first essay examines an important question in this behavioral finance literature: changes in aggregate risk aversion. I use changes in the level of terrorism in the United States as a shock to the aggregate mood of American investors, and examine changes in flows to mutual funds as a proxy for investor risk preferences. After examining investors vulnerable to changes in mood after attacks, and ruling out any possible effect due to changes in expect risk, and changes to expected returns, the first essay concludes that mood driven risk aversion is the likely cause of the change in behavior. In the second essay, we use the insights gained from Essay 1 regarding the change in behavior of U.S. investors following an increase in terrorist attacks. Using household level of equity market participation and individual trading data the second essay examines the array of decisions investors make. The second essay finds that households participate less in equity markets, trade less, but purchase more local stocks in response to terrorist attacks. Additionally, this change in behavior is especially apparent in households where the designated head is a male. Finally, in the third essay we turn away from terrorism, and examine the effects that local NFL team performance on equity market participation. Examining the most popular spectator sport in the U.S. the third essay shows that poor performance by local NFL teams correlates with fewer households in that state owning equity. While previous studies argue that sentiment is the driver of sports related behavior, the third essay find that gambling losses may also play a role in the drop in equity market participation following seasons with a low number of wins. Taken together, the dissertation demonstrates the importance of examining external shocks and the effect they have on the behavior of investors. From terrorism to something as seemingly benign as the NFL, the dissertation adds to the behavior finance literature by identifying new shocks that effect the investing behavior of individuals.

Download or read book EBOOK Behavioral Corporate Finance 2 e written by SHEFRIN and published by McGraw Hill. This book was released on 2018-05-18 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: EBOOK: Behavioral Corporate Finance, 2/e

Download or read book Essays on Behavioral Finance written by Sujung Choi and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of two essays. In the first essay, "Investor misvaluation, signaling, and takeovers: Evidence from closed-end fund discounts", I investigate investor misvaluation as a motivation for closed-end fund mergers and acquisitions (M & As). Following previous studies, I view the closed-end fund discount as a proxy for investor misvaluation at the individual fund level. When a closed-end fund suffers from investor misvaluation in the stock market, closed-end fund M & As can be served to investors to signal a rosy prospect for the closed-end fund, or a synergy effect. Using comprehensive data of closed-end fund M & As from 1994 through 2009, I find that (1) both acquirer and target funds experience deep fund discounts over pre-announcement periods and (2) acquirer funds are less likely to be undervalued than target funds, and target funds are more deeply undervalued than acquirer funds when M & As occur. After M & A announcements, fund discounts shrink for targets, but go slightly deeper for acquirers. In the long run, fund discounts of the combined funds shrink even for acquirers, and the misvaluation on acquirer and target closed-end funds is corrected. Post-merger objective-adjusted performance initially improves for both acquirer and target funds because of the synergies perceived by investors, but generally worsens on average in the third year following the M & As. In the second essay, "Herding among individual investors in the Korean stock market", I investigate whether herding among local individual investors exists in the Korean stock market. I examine the hypothesis of whether a potential investor's decision, such as picking a particular stock within a given period, correlates with the decisions of neighbors living in the same area. Using a unique dataset on individual online and offline trading obtained from a brokerage firm in Korea, I analyze the buying and selling transactions of 10,000 individual accounts from February 1999 to December 2005. By employing the herding measure proposed by Lakonishok, Shleifer, and Vishny (1992), I report that individual investors herd on a given stock-month and stock-day. Offline investors in the same local area exhibit stronger herding compared to online investors. Using OLS regressions, I find that own-area effects, or correlated trades by individual investors who are geographically close, are stronger compared to other-area effects in both contemporaneous and lagged coefficients. Investors who are male, wealthy, and non-religious tend to invest more in the stock market compared to investors who are female and Protestant.

Download or read book Behavioral Finance written by H. Kent Baker and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-10-05 with total page 773 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A definitive guide to the growing field of behavioral finance This reliable resource provides a comprehensive view of behavioral finance and its psychological foundations, as well as its applications to finance. Comprising contributed chapters written by distinguished authors from some of the most influential firms and universities in the world, Behavioral Finance provides a synthesis of the most essential elements of this discipline, including psychological concepts and behavioral biases, the behavioral aspects of asset pricing, asset allocation, and market prices, as well as investor behavior, corporate managerial behavior, and social influences. Uses a structured approach to put behavioral finance in perspective Relies on recent research findings to provide guidance through the maze of theories and concepts Discusses the impact of sub-optimal financial decisions on the efficiency of capital markets, personal wealth, and the performance of corporations Behavioral finance has quickly become part of mainstream finance. If you need to gain a better understanding of this topic, look no further than this book.

Download or read book Essays on Corporate Finance Theory and Behavioral Asset Pricing written by Jieying Hong and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three self-contained papers. The first two papers study how firms should be structured to facilitate their access to funds in the face of agency conflicts between borrowers (firms) and lenders (investors). Chapter 1 studies the relationship between firm scope and financial constraints. Chapter 2 uses an optimal contracting approach to analyze the development of an innovative product through strategic alliance by an entrepreneur and an incumbent. Chapter 3 analyzes whether traders' experience reduce their propensity to speculate?

Download or read book Behavioralizing Finance written by Hersh Shefrin and published by Now Publishers Inc. This book was released on 2010 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behavioralizing Finance provides a structured approach to behavioral finance in respect to underlying psychological concepts, formal framework, testable hypotheses, and empirical findings.

Download or read book Two Essays in Corporate Finance written by An Chee Low and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: Problems of endogeneity often cloud interpretation in corporate governance research. In this dissertation, I make use of changes in takeover laws as exogenous shocks to examine how managers react to a weakening of the corporate governance structure. In the first essay, I examine how the increased protection from hostile takeovers affects managerial incentives to change firm risk, while in the second essay I examine how firm size and firm investment behavior changes in response to the exogenous shocks. In both cases, I find that managers take actions that are beneficial to themselves but are detrimental to shareholders. Empirical evidence in the first essay show that risk-averse managers decrease firm risk in response to an exogenous increase in takeover protection in Delaware during the mid-1990s. I also find that the decrease in firm risk is concentrated among firms with low managerial equity-based incentives. Further, firms respond to the increased protection accorded by the regime shift by providing managers with greater incentives for risk-taking. Overall, the evidence supports the hypothesis that equity-based compensation can be used to align managerial interests with that of shareholders. In the second essay, I find that managers increase their firm size in response to the increased protection from hostile takeovers. The increase is predominantly among firms with low growth and high cash holdings which are exactly the firms where the agency costs of free cash flow are most costly to shareholders (Jensen, 1986). I also predict important differences in managerial empire-building through internal investments versus external acquisitions in the 1980s and 1990s based on changes in stocks and options-based incentives. Consistent with my predictions, managers prefer to empire-build through internal investments during the 1980s, while in 1990s they choose to grow more through external acquisitions.

Download or read book Behavioral Vs Traditional Corporate Finance written by James S. Ang and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research in behavioral corporate finance has accumulated to the point that it may now be a viable contender as an alternative to traditional corporate finance. This review consists of three parts. First, I discuss the foundations behind these two competing theories. I clarify concepts such as rational versus irrational behaviors of managers contrasted with those of the investors. Second, I make side by side comparisons and a critical examination of the two theories in the main topic areas of dividends, capital structure, and investments. Part three gives practical suggestions on how practitioners may use behavioral finance in their dealings as well as avoid known behavioral biases.