This paper examines post-revision return drift, or PRD, following analysts’ revisions of their stock recommendations. PRD refers to the finding that the analysts’ recommendation changes predict future long-term returns in the same direction as the change (i.e., upgrades are followed by positive returns, and downgrades are followed by negative returns). During the high-frequency algorithmic trading period of 2003–2010, average PRD is no longer significantly different from zero. The new findings agree with improved market efficiency after declines in real trading cost inefficiencies. They are consistent with a reduced information production role for analysts in the supercomputer era.

We examine institutional demand prior to well-known stock return anomalies and find that institutions have a strong tendency to buy stocks classified as overvalued (short leg of anomaly), and that these stocks have particularly negative ex post abnormal returns. Our results differ from numerous studies documenting a positive relation between institutional demand and future returns. We trace the difference to measurement horizon. We too find a positive relation at a quarterly horizon. However, the relation turns strongly negative at the one-year horizon used in anomaly studies. We consider several explanations for institutions’ tendency to trade contrary to anomaly prescriptions. Our evidence largely rules out explanations based on flow and limits-of-arbitrage, but is more consistent with agency-induced preferences for stock characteristics that relate to poor long-run performance.

Many households display inertia in investment management over their life cycles. Our calibrated dynamic life cycle portfolio choice model can account for such an apparently ‘irrational’ outcome, by incorporating the fact that investors must forgo acquiring job-specific skills when they spend time managing their money, and their efficiency in financial decision making varies with age. Resulting inertia patterns mesh well with findings from prior studies and our own empirical results from Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data. We also analyze how people optimally choose between actively managing their assets versus delegating the task to financial advisors. Delegation proves valuable to both the young and the old. Our calibrated model quantifies welfare gains from including investment time and money costs as well as delegation in a life cycle setting.

This study provides strong evidence of a causal effect of risk-taking incentives provided by option compensation on corporate risk management. We utilize the passage of Financial Accounting Standard (FAS) 123R, which required firms to expense options, to investigate how chief executive officer option compensation affects the hedging behavior of oil and gas firms. Firms that did not expense options before FAS 123R significantly reduced option pay, which resulted in a large increase in their hedging intensity compared with firms that did not use options or expensed their options voluntarily prior to FAS 123R.

We examine chief executive officer (CEO) career and compensation changes for large firms filing for Chapter 11. One-third of the incumbent CEOs maintain executive employment, and these CEOs experience a median compensation change of zero. However, incumbent CEOs leaving the executive labor market suffer a compensation loss with a median present value until age 65 of 7 million (five times pre-departure compensation). The likelihood of leaving decreases with profitability and CEO share ownership. Furthermore, creditor control rights during bankruptcy (through debtor-in-possession financing and large trade credits) are associated with CEO career change. Despite large equity losses (median 11 million for incumbents who stay until filing), the median incumbent does not reduce his stock ownership as the firm approaches bankruptcy.

We test the relation between ambiguity aversion and five household portfolio choice puzzles: nonparticipation in equities, low allocations to equity, home-bias, own-company stock ownership, and portfolio under-diversification. In a representative US household survey, we measure ambiguity preferences using custom-designed questions based on Ellsberg urns. As theory predicts, ambiguity aversion is negatively associated with stock market participation, the fraction of financial assets in stocks, and foreign stock ownership, but it is positively related to own-company stock ownership. Conditional on stock ownership, ambiguity aversion is related to portfolio under-diversification, and during the financial crisis, ambiguity-averse respondents were more likely to sell stocks.