This study evaluates the effectiveness of geographic diversification in reducing housing investment risk. To characterize diversification potential, we estimate spatial correlation and integration among 401 U.S. metropolitan housing markets. The 2000s boom brought a marked uptrend in housing market integration associated with eased residential lending standards and rapid growth in private mortgage securitization. As boom turned to bust, other macroeconomic factors, including employment and income fundamentals, importantly contributed to the trending up in housing return integration. Portfolio simulations reveal substantially lower diversification potential and higher risk in the wake of increased market integration.

Consistent with predictions from a stylized Bayesian learning model stock return volatility declines with CEO tenure in a convex manner, even for CEOs whose appointments occur for exogenous reasons. The decline is faster when there is higher uncertainty about the CEO's ability when there is more transparency about the firm's prospects, and when CEO ability is more important in value creation. We quantify the importance of uncertainty about CEO ability relative to the firm's fundamental cash flow uncertainty in contributing to stock return volatility, highlighting the importance of management in creating value.

Evaluating agency theory and optimal contracting theory views of corporate philanthropy, we find that as corporate giving increases, shareholders reduce their valuation of firm cash holdings. Dividend increases following the 2003 Tax Reform Act are associated with reduced corporate giving. Using a natural experiment, we find that corporate giving is positively (negatively) associated with CEO charity preferences (CEO shareholdings and corporate governance quality). Evidence from CEO-affiliated charity donations, market reactions to insider-affiliated donations, its relation to CEO compensation, and firm contributions to director-affiliated charities indicates that corporate donations advance CEO interests and suggests misuses of corporate resources that reduce firm value.

Using a sample of non-U.S. firms from 43 countries, we investigate whether laws and regulations as well as votes cast by U.S. institutional investors are consistent with an effective shareholder voting process. We find that laws and regulations allow for meaningful votes to be cast, as shareholder voting is both mandatory and binding for important elections. For votes cast, we find there is greater dissent voting when investors fear expropriation. Further, greater dissent voting is associated with higher director turnover and more M&A withdrawals. Our results suggest that shareholder voting is an effective mechanism for exercising governance around the world.

We analyze an extensive proprietary database of corporate social responsibility engagements with U.S. public companies from 1999–2009. Engagements address environmental, social, and governance concerns. Successful (unsuccessful) engagements are followed by positive (zero) abnormal returns. Companies with inferior governance and socially conscious institutional investors are more likely to be engaged. Success in engagements is more probable if the engaged firm has reputational concerns and higher capacity to implement changes. Collaboration among activists is instrumental in increasing the success rate of environmental/social engagements. After successful engagements, particularly on environmental/social issues, companies experience improved accounting performance and governance and increased institutional ownership.

We hypothesize that individual investors treat trading as a fun and exciting gambling activity, implying substitution between this activity and alternative gambling opportunities. To examine this hypothesis, we study the lottery jackpots and the trading of individual investors in Taiwan. When the jackpots exceed 500 million Taiwan dollars, the trading volume decreases between 5.2% and 9.1% among stocks preferred by individual investors and between 6.8% and 8.6% among lottery-like stocks. The decline in individual buy volume is statistically indistinct from the decline in sell volume. Large jackpots are associated with less trading in options with high sensitivity to volatility.

The media has an incentive to publish sensational news. We study how this incentive affects the accuracy of media coverage in the context of merger rumors. Using a novel dataset, we find that accuracy is predicted by a journalist's experience, specialized education, and industry expertise. Conversely, less accurate stories use ambiguous language and feature well-known firms with broad readership appeal. Investors do not fully account for the predictive power of these characteristics, leading to an initial target price overreaction and a subsequent reversal, consistent with limited attention. Overall, we provide novel evidence on the determinants of media accuracy and its effect on asset prices.

This paper shows that housing wealth helps alleviate credit constraints for potential entrepreneurs by enabling home owners to extract equity from their property and invest it in their business. Using a large U.S. individual-level survey dataset for the 1996–2006 period, we find that a 10% increase in home equity raises the share of individuals who transition into self-employment each year from 1% to 1.07%. Our results persist when we use proxies for aggregate housing demand shocks and for the topological elasticity of housing supply to generate variation in home equity that is orthogonal to entrepreneurial choice

This paper studies the long-term effect of hedge fund activism on firm productivity using plant-level information from the U.S. Census Bureau. A typical target firm improves production efficiency in the 3 years after intervention, with stronger improvements in business strategy-oriented interventions. Plants sold after intervention improve productivity significantly under new ownership, suggesting that capital redeployment is an important channel for value creation. Employees of target firms experience stagnation in work hours and wages despite an increase in labor productivity. Additional tests refute alternative explanations attributing the improvement to mean reversion, management's voluntary reforms, industry consolidation shocks, or activists' stock-picking abilities

This paper is a new incarnation of the defunct work previously circulated under the titles "Neoclassical Factors," "An equilibrium three-factor model," "Production-based factors," "A better three-factor model that explains more anomalies," and "An alternative three-factor model." We are extremely grateful to Robert Novy-Marx