We examine whether the protection of trade secrets by restricting the mobility of knowledgeable employees through the adoption of the legal Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD), an exogenous event, increases the marginal value of corporate cash holdings by reducing the uncertainty of future cash flows, and how that value differs across firms in IDD recognizing and non- recognizing states. We find that the marginal value of cash holdings increases (decreases) significantly in states in which the IDD has (not) been recognized through increases (decreases) in firm value and performance. A battery of robustness tests reveals that the effect of the IDD is more pronounced in firms with high R&D activities. Overall, the evidence shows that the IDD acts as a mechanism that inhibits the mobility of key employees and, thus, reduces the probability of the misappropriation of knowledge-based human capital assets. That is, the IDD creates an opportunity for firms to efficiently use cash to increase firm value - rather than using cash to protect trade secrets from rivals.

We consider whether sentiment affects the profitability of momentum strategies. We hypothesize that news that contradicts investors’ sentiment causes cognitive dissonance, slowing the diffusion of such news. Thus, losers (winners) become underpriced under optimism (pessimism). Short-selling constraints may impede arbitraging of losers and thus strengthen momentum during optimistic periods. Supporting this notion, we empirically show that momentum profits arise only under optimism. An analysis of net order flows from small and large trades indicates that small investors are slow to sell losers during optimistic periods. Momentum-based hedge portfolios formed during optimistic periods experience long-run reversals.

In this paper we examine the relation between equity mispricing and arbitrage risk and find that stocks with high arbitrage risk have higher estimated mispricing than stocks with low arbitrage risk. These results are not limited to high book-to-market or small capitalization stocks, and they are not sensitive to transaction and short-selling costs. In addition, they remain robust to alternative multifactor return generating specification models and mispricing measures. Overall, our empirical results are consistent with the conjecture that mispricing is a manifestation of the inability of arbitrageurs to hedge idiosyncratic risk, a major deterrent to arbitrage activity.

In this paper, we examine the relation between stock returns and analysts' heterogeneous expectations. We find that stock returns are positively associated with divergence of opinion. Our evidence provides no support for Miller's (1977) overvaluation hypothesis, which predicts lower (higher) future returns for high (low) divergence of opinion stocks in the presence of short-selling constraints. Our findings are based on the use of the diversity measure, which is free from the confounding effects of uncertainty in analysts' forecasts and is therefore a more accurate measure of divergence of opinion than dispersion. Our results refute the view that dispersion in analysts' forecasts reflects divergence of opinion. Our evidence is robust to the use of alternative measures of short-selling constraints, time intervals, optimism in analysts' forecasts, and herding in analysts' behavior.

Several empirical studies show that investment strategies that favor the purchase of stocks with low prices relative to conventional measures of value yield higher returns. Some of these studies imply that investors are too optimistic about (glamour) stocks that have had good performance in the recent past and too pessimistic about (value) stocks that have performed poorly. We examine whether investors systematically overestimate (underestimate) the future earnings performance of glamour (value) stocks over the 1976 to 1997 period. Our results fail to support the extrapolation hypothesis that posits that the superior performance of value stocks is because investors make systematic errors in predicting future growth in earnings of out‐of‐favor stocks.

We investigate whether and, if so, how stakeholder orientation affects the value of cash holdings by disciplining inefficient management and reducing agency costs. In so doing, we exploit the staggered enactment of constituency statutes across different states as an exogenous shock that increases the degree of stakeholder orientation substantially. Specifically, we gauge the monitoring effect of stakeholders by using the market value of cash framework of Faulkender and Wang (2006). We find that on average the marginal value of cash holdings increases significantly, both statistically and economically, after the passage of constituency statutes. The effect of constituency statutes on the value of cash holdings is stronger for firms with relatively weaker stakeholder power, high agency costs, and high information asymmetry. In subsequent tests, we show that investment efficiency in M&As and capital expenditures has improved significantly after the adoption of constituency statutes suggesting that heightened stakeholder monitoring over investments is a potential channel to enhance the value of cash holdings. Overall, our results suggest that stakeholder orientation increases the value of cash holdings by mitigating agency problems.

This study presents a theoretical model that links chief executive officer (CEO) overconfidence to the value loss of corporate diversification. Consistent with the model's prediction, the findings show that diversified firms run by overconfident CEOs experience value loss compared to diversified firms run by their rational counterparts. Empirically, the value loss is economically significant and ranges between 12.5% and 14.1%. In addition, the model predicts heightened corporate refocusing activity by overconfident CEOs who pursued diversified investments in the past once realized returns fail to match initial expectations. The empirical odds of corporate refocusing decisions are 67% to 98% higher when past diversifications are undertaken by overconfident rather than rational CEOs. Another prediction of the model is that overconfident CEOs exhibit preference for diversified investments, especially in the presence of ample internal funds. This prediction is also strongly supported by the data. Overall, this study proposes CEO overconfidence as a unified and consistent explanation of why firms pursue value-destructive corporate diversification policies and later adopt refocusing policies aiming to restore value.