This paper investigates the effect of California's Proposition 103 on the market value of publicly traded property- and liability-insurance companies. The passage of this referendum on November 8, 1988 moved California from a market-oriented to a heavily regulated insurance-pricing system. During the period surrounding the election, the average stock price of insurance companies doing business in California declined by 6.91%. The decline is positively related to the proportion of a firm's premiums affected by the referendum and the proportion generated in other states where insurance regulation is likely to change, and negatively related to the firm's profitability.

We use detailed assessments of CEO personalities to explore the nature of CEO overconfidence as it is commonly measured. Longholder, the option-based measure of CEO overconfidence introduced by Malmendier and Tate (2005a) and widely used in the behavioral corporate finance and economics literatures, is significantly related to several specific characteristics that are associated with overconfident individuals as well as individuals with lower ability. Similar relations hold for overconfidence measures based on CEOs’ earnings guidance. Investment-cash flow sensitivities are larger for both Longholder and less able CEOs. After controlling for ability and other characteristics, Longholder CEOs’ investments remain significantly more sensitive to cash flows. These results suggest that overconfidence, as measured by Longholder, is correlated with lower ability but still reflects empirically distinct aspects of overconfidence.

How are financial markets pricing the monetary policy outlook? We use surveys to decompose excess returns on money market instruments into expectation errors and term premia. Excess returns are primarily driven by expectation errors, whereas term premia are negligible. Investors face challenges when learning about the Federal Reserve’s response to large, but infrequent, negative shocks in real-time. Rather than reflecting risk compensation, excess returns stem from investors underestimating how much the central bank eases policy in response to such rare shocks. We show, for the US and internationally, that expectation errors imply excess return predictability from past stock returns.

We derive a measure that captures the extent to which common ownership shifts managers’ incentives to internalize externalities. A key feature of the measure is that it allows for the possibility that not all investors are attentive to whether a manager's actions benefit the investor's overall portfolio. Empirically, we show that potential drivers of common ownership, including mergers in the asset management industry and, under certain circumstances, even indexing, could diminish managerial motives to internalize externalities. Our findings illustrate the importance of accounting for investor inattention when analyzing whether the growth of common ownership affects managerial incentives.

We explore how asymmetric information in financial markets affects outcomes in product markets. Difference-in-difference tests around brokerage house merger/closure events (which increase asymmetric information through reductions in analyst coverage) indicate worse industry-adjusted sales growth for shocked firms than for their peers. Our results are consistent with Bolton and Scharfstein's (1990) tradeoff between investor agency concerns and predation risk. Further support is found in stronger treatment effects among firms with ex ante greater agency concerns, financing constraints, asymmetric information, and those operating in ex ante more competitive (fluid) product market spaces. Our results are concentrated in industries where we can clearly identify either net firm entry or exit.

During the past decade, non-bank institutional investors are increasingly taking larger roles in the corporate lending than they historically have played. These non-bank institutional lenders typically have higher required rates of return than banks, but invest in the same loan facilities. In a sample of 20,031 leveraged loan facilities originated between 1997 and 2007, facilities including a non-bank institution in their syndicates have higher spreads than otherwise identical bank-only facilities. Contrary to risk-based explanations of this finding, non-bank facilities are priced with premiums relative to bank-only facilities in the same loan package. These non-bank premiums are substantially larger when a hedge or private equity fund is one of the syndicate members. Consistent with the notion that firms are willing to pay a premium when loan facilities are particularly important to them, the non-bank premiums are larger when borrowing firms face financial constraints and when capital is less available from banks.

We build an equilibrium model of commodity markets in which speculators are capital constrained, and commodity producers have hedging demands for commodity futures. Increases in producers' hedging demand or speculators' capital constraints increase hedging costs via price-pressure on futures. These in turn affect producers' equilibrium hedging and supply decision inducing a link between a financial friction in the futures market and the commodity spot prices. Consistent with the model, measures of producers' propensity to hedge forecasts futures returns and spot prices in oil and gas market data from 1979 to 2010. The component of the commodity futures risk premium associated with producer hedging demand rises when speculative activity reduces. We conclude that limits to financial arbitrage generate limits to hedging by producers, and affect equilibrium commodity supply and prices.

Using governance metrics based on antitakeover provisions and inside ownership, we find that firms with weaker corporate governance structures actually have smaller cash reserves. When distributing cash to shareholders, firms with weaker governance structures choose to repurchase instead of increasing dividends, avoiding future payout commitments. The combination of excess cash and weak shareholder rights leads to increases in capital expenditures and acquisitions. Firms with low shareholder rights and excess cash have lower profitability and valuations. However, there is only limited evidence that the presence of excess cash alters the overall relation between governance and profitability. In the US, weakly controlled managers choose to spend cash quickly on acquisitions and capital expenditures, rather than hoard it.

We develop a Q theory of investment under financing constraints. The firm invests and saves optimally facing convex costs of external equity, overhang from outstanding debt, and collateral constraints on new borrowing. Overhang and costs of external equity discourage investment. Conversely, firms anticipating collateral constraints experience a side benefit from investing as installed capital relaxes future constraints. Empirical tests support the model. Conditional on average Q, investment is lower for equity issuers and for firms with large debt overhang. The Kaplan and Zingales and the Whited and Wu indices are used as proxies for future collateral constraints. Consistent with the model, both indices enter investment regressions positively.

Stocks are short-sale constrained when there is a strong demand to sell short and a limited supply of shares to borrow. Using data on both short interest (a proxy for demand) and institutional ownership (a proxy for supply) we find that constrained stocks underperform during the period 1988–2002 by a significant 215 basis points per month on an equally weighted basis, although by only an insignificant 39 basis points per month on a value-weighted basis. For the overwhelming majority of stocks, short interest and institutional ownership levels make short selling constraints unlikely.