We find strong evidence that when a firm's customer base is more concentrated, the firm's CEO receives more risk-taking incentives in her compensation package. This finding is robust to numerous alternative measures, alternative specifications, alternative subsamples, and different attempts that mitigate endogeneity concerns. Further, the positive effect of customer concentration on CEO risk-taking incentive provision is more prominent when the CEO is more reluctant to take risks, when the firm has more investment opportunities, and when the firm is more prone to the costs of losing large customers. These findings are consistent with the notion that boards provide additional risk-taking incentives to offset the CEO's aversion to the risk of non-diversified revenue streams, thereby preventing excessive managerial conservatism at the expense of value maximization.

While investor sentiment has been shown to have a robust, direct impact on stock returns, we know little about how it impacts returns through an indirect channel from conditional volatility. We conduct a global study of investor sentiment across 40 international stock markets to examine the impact of investor sentiment on stock returns via both direct and indirect channels and how the impact varies across bull and bear market regimes. Using turnover ratio as the sentiment proxy and applying GARCH-type models, we confirm a conditional impact of investor sentiment on stock returns via both channels: In bull regimes, optimistic (pessimistic) shifts in investor sentiment would increase (decrease) stock returns, while in bear regimes, optimistic (pessimistic) shifts would decrease (increase) stock returns.