We provide empirical evidence that a firm's overall visibility with investors, as measured by its product market advertising, has important consequences for the stock market. Specifically we show that firms with greater advertising expenditures, ceteris paribus, have a larger number of both individual and institutional investors, and better liquidity of their common stock. Our findings are robust to a variety of methodological approaches and to various measures of liquidity. These results suggest that the investors' degree of familiarity with a firm may affect its cost of capital and consequently its value.

We investigate resource allocation decisions in conglomerates when managers are motivated by career concerns. When divisional cash flows are differentially informative about managerial ability, we show that it is in the managers' interest to overallocate unobservable intangible resources to the more informative divisions. Anticipating this bias, it is optimal for the firm's owners to also overallocate observable capital to the more informative divisions. The model provides rationale for corporate socialism and corporate hedging. It also highlights a cost of segment reporting and tracking stocks, namely, that they allow managers to distort their perceived ability at the expense of investors.

We provide empirical evidence that a firm's overall visibility with investors, as measured by its product market advertising, has important consequences for the stock market. Specifically we show that firms with greater advertising expenditures, ceteris paribus, have a larger number of both individual and institutional investors, and better liquidity of their common stock. Our findings are robust to a variety of methodological approaches and to various measures of liquidity. These results suggest that the investors' degree of familiarity with a firm may affect its cost of capital and consequently its value.

We investigate resource allocation decisions in conglomerates when managers are motivated by career concerns. When divisional cash flows are differentially informative about managerial ability, we show that it is in the managers' interest to overallocate unobservable intangible resources to the more informative divisions. Anticipating this bias, it is optimal for the firm's owners to also overallocate observable capital to the more informative divisions. The model provides rationale for corporate socialism and corporate hedging. It also highlights a cost of segment reporting and tracking stocks, namely, that they allow managers to distort their perceived ability at the expense of investors.