Has the academic review process become excessive? In a setting where editors cannot distinguish significant flaws from mere blemishes, reviewers recommend the repair of blemishes in order to acquire reputations for high skill. In equilibrium, editors accede to reviewer insistence upon such cosmetic surgery. If blemishes are sometimes unremovable, demands for repair sometimes block good papers from publication. This implies a social value to active editing. Reviewer signal-jamming may especially suppress innovative research and research designed to verify others' findings. This perspective strongly suggests that the growth of the review process is harmful. I therefore offer tentative proposals for reform.

This paper examines equilibrium in a spot and futures market with both primary producers (growers) and intermediate producers (processors). For a commodity that is subject to output shocks, processors tend to hedge long, in contrast with Hick's theory of futures hedging. Nevertheless, if transaction costs are low, the two-stage production process brings about a downward futures price bias, consistent with Hick's pricing prediction. But if costs of trading futures are high, growers tend to be differentially driven from the futures market, reversing the direction of the bias. Futures trading may also affect the organization of industry; when demand is inelastic, futures trading can serve as a substitute for vertical integration as a means of diversifying risk because the risk positions of growers are complementary with those of processors.

[Behavioral theories suggest that investor misperceptions and market mispricing will be correlated across firms. We use equity and debt financing to identify common misvaluation across firms. A zero-investment portfolio (UMO, undervalued minus overvalued) built from repurchase and issue firms captures comovement in returns beyond that in some standard multifactor models, and substantially improves the Sharpe ratio of the tangency portfolio. Loadings on UMO incrementally predict the cross-section of returns on both portfolios and individual stocks, even among firms not recently involved in external financing activities. Further evidence suggests that UMO loadings proxy for the common component of a stock's misvaluation.]

[We examine how investor preferences and beliefs affect trading in relation to past gains and losses. The probability of selling as a function of profit is V-shaped; at short holding periods, investors are more likely to sell big losers than small ones. There is little evidence of an upward jump in selling at zero profits. These findings provide no clear indication that realization preference explains trading. Furthermore, the disposition effect is not driven by a simple direct preference for selling a stock by virtue of having a gain versus a loss. Trading based on belief revisions can potentially explain these findings.]

[We show that the incentive for managers to build their reputations distorts firms' investment policies in favor of relatively safe projects, thereby aligning managers' interests with those of bond-holders, even though managers are hired and fired by shareholders. This effect opposes the familiar agency problem of risky debt that is imperfectly covenant-protected, wherein shareholders are tempted to favor excessively risky projects in order to expropriate bondholders. Consequently, when managerial concern for reputation results in conservatism, it can actually make shareholders better off ex ante by allowing the firm to issue more debt. We examine how the optimal choice of leverage from the shareholders' standpoint is influenced by takeover activity, and how the adoption of anti-takeover measures affects a firm's investment policy and leverage choice.]

This paper presents a model of tender offers in which the bid perfectly reveals the bidder's private information about the size of the value improvement that can be generated by a takeover. We argue that bidders with greater improvements will offer higher premia to ensure that sufficient shares are tendered to obtain control. The model relates announcement date returns and takeover success or failure to the amount bid, the initial shareholdings of the bidder, the number of shares the bidder attempts to purchase, the dilution of minority shareholders, and managerial opposition. We show that managerial defensive measures will sometimes increase the probability of the offer's success, either by raising the incentive to bid high or by decreasing the asymmetry of information about the improvement.

In our model risk-neutral shareholders need to motivate a manager to select among projects with different risks, and to work hard in implementing the chosen project. Curvature of the manager's compensation contract as a function of profit affects his attitude toward project risk. The optimal curvature depends on the trade-off between controlling project risk and motivating effort. The analysis predicts greater option-based compensation when there are desirable risky growth opportunities (proxied by Tobin's q or R&D expenditures) and less option compensation when there are effective monitoring institutions (such as outside directors and bank lenders).

This paper examines the determinants of commodity futures hedging and of risk premia arising from covariation of the futures price with stock market returns, and with the reve? nues of producers. Owing to supply shocks that stochastically redistribute real wealth (surplus) between producers and consumers, and to limited participation in the futures market, the total risk premium in the model is not proportional to the contract's covariance with aggregate consumption. Stock market variability interacts with the incentive to hedge, causing the producer hedging component of the risk premium to increase (de? crease) with income elasticity, for a normal (inferior) good. Production costs that depend on output raise the premium. We argue that output and demand shocks will typically be positively correlated, raising the premium. High supply elasticity reduces the absolute heding premium by reducing the variability of spot price and revenue.

We document persistent superior trading performance among a subset of individual investors. Investors classified in the top performance decile in the first half of our sample subsequently earn risk-adjusted returns of about 6% per year. These returns are not confined to stocks in which the investors are likely to have inside information, nor are they driven by illiquid stocks. Our results suggest that skilled individual investors exploit market inefficiencies (or perhaps conditional risk premiums) to earn abnormal profits, above and beyond any profits available from well-known strategies based on size, value, momentum, or earnings announcements. (JEL G11, G14, G40, G51) Received: October 11, 2020 Editorial decision: January 4, 2021 Editor: Jeffrey Pontiff