Financial markets reveal information that firm managers can utilize when making equity value-enhancing investment decisions. However, for firms with risky debt, such investments are not necessarily socially efficient. Despite this friction, we show that learning from prices improves investment efficiency. This effect is asymmetric, however, as investors learn less about projects that decrease the riskiness of cash flows: efficiency is lower for diversifying investments than for focusing (risk-increasing) investments. This also implies that investors’ endogenous learning further attenuates risk shifting but amplifies debt overhang. Our model provides a novel channel through which learning from financial markets affects agency frictions between stakeholders.

The psychology literature documents that individuals derive current utility from their beliefs about future events. We show that, as a result, investors in financial markets choose to disagree about both private information and price information. When objective price informativeness is low, each investor dismisses the private signals of others and ignores price information. In contrast, when prices are sufficiently informative, heterogeneous interpretations arise endogenously: most investors ignore prices, while the rest condition on it. Our analysis demonstrates how observed deviations from rational expectations (e.g., dismissiveness, overconfidence) arise endogenously, interact with each other, and vary with economic conditions.