We propose that chief executive officer (CEO) exploratory mindset (inherent desire to search for novel ideas and long-term orientation) promotes innovation. Firms with CEOs with PhD degrees (PhD CEOs) produce more exploratory patents with greater novelty, generality, and originality. PhD CEOs engage less in managing earnings and stock prices, invest more in research and development (R&D) and alliances, generate higher long-term value of patents, and experience more positive market reactions to R&D alliances. Their firms achieve superior long-run operating performance. They tend to be hired by research-intensive firms with poor financial performance. Evidence from managerial incentive shocks and turnovers suggests that these effects do not derive solely from CEO–firm matching.

We study how the arrival of macro-news affects the stock market's ability to incorporate the information in firm-level earnings announcements. Existing theories suggest that macro and firm-level earnings news are attention substitutes; macro-news announcements crowd out firm-level attention, causing less efficient processing of firm-level earnings announcements. We find the opposite: the sensitivity of announcement returns to earnings news is 17% stronger, and post-earnings announcement drift 71% weaker, on macro-news days. This suggests a complementary relationship between macro and micro news that is consistent with either investor attention or information transmission channels.

We offer a new social approach to investment decision making and asset prices. Investors discuss their strategies and convert others to their strategies with a probability that increases in investment returns. The conversion rate is shown to be convex in realized returns. Unconditionally, active strategies (e.g., high variance and skewness) dominate, although investors have no inherent preference for these characteristics. The model has strong predictions for how the adoption of active strategies depends on investors’ social networks. In contrast with nonsocial approaches, sociability, self-enhancing transmission, and other features of the communication process determine the popularity and pricing of active investment strategies.