Myopic investors focus on short-run price changes rather than long-term fundamental value, resulting in an overweighting of public information and a slow diffusion of fundamental news. Such processing of information can produce price drifts similar to those seen in behavioral models of momentum. We explore the impact of myopia over an international sample, finding that momentum is stronger in more myopic countries, and this relationship is magnified where the proportion of funds under delegated management is high. We therefore argue that investor myopia, which arises due to agency issues in delegated funds management, is an important determinant of momentum.

Dual-class shares often violate the ‘one share-one vote’ principle, thereby creating the potential for agency problems. We develop a model of time-variation in the pricing of these agency problems, as reflected by the voting premium. A key implication of this model is that insiders face a trade-off between the private benefits of control and the value of their cash-flow claims on the firm, resulting in a negative relationship between the voting premium and the expected present value of firm cash flows. As predicted by this model, we report empirical evidence consistent with ‘flights-to-control’, where the voting premium increases substantially during financial crises and when negative earnings surprises are announced. These relationships are accentuated for firms where agency problems might be expected to be more pronounced. The average voting premium is also shown to decrease around events that reduce the ability for insiders to extract private benefits of control.

Behavioural models of investor behaviour propose that sentiment affects investors’ responses to corporate announcements. As beliefs can be cross-sectionally heterogeneous, firm-specific investor sentiment may differ from aggregate levels of investor sentiment. We provide empirical evidence about the explanatory power of both firm- and market-level investor sentiment for corporate announcement returns. We demonstrate empirically that firm-level investor sentiment has marginal explanatory power beyond market-level investor sentiment for corporate announcement returns, turnover and long-run reversals. Previous studies, which focus on market-level investor sentiment measures are likely to have under-stated the economic magnitude of the role that sentiment plays in corporate announcement returns.

We find that positive collateral shocks caused by increases in local real estate prices increase firms' propensities to undertake mergers and acquisitions (M&As). This effect is more pronounced for financially constrained and bank-dependent firms. After collateral value appreciation, acquirers issue more bank debt, secured debt, and lines of credit to finance acquisitions and show a preference for cash offer over equity offer to finance M&As. M&As driven by positive collateral shocks create value for acquiring shareholders in the long-run by avoiding overpayments, and generating synergies. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of the collateral channel in affecting the propensity and performance of M&A deals.