We show that chief executive officers (CEOs) exhibit a hometown bias in acquisitions. Firms are over twice as likely to acquire targets located in the states of their CEOs’ childhood homes than similar targets domiciled elsewhere. Small, private home-state deals underperform other small, private deals, and the bias is stronger when acquirer governance is lax, suggesting that CEOs acquire private home-state targets for their own benefits. In contrast, large, public home-state acquisitions are value enhancing. CEOs create value in public home-state acquisitions by avoiding extremely poor deals and through deals with higher synergies. Thus, both agency issues and hometown advantages drive home-state acquisitions.

Using exogenous wealth shocks stemming from the collapse of the housing market, we show that managers who experience substantial losses in their home values subsequently reduce risk in their delegated funds. The decline in fund risk comes through reductions in idiosyncratic risk and tracking error, suggesting that the behavior is likely driven by career concerns. Our paper provides evidence that idiosyncratic personal preferences affect mutual fund managers’ professional decisions and offers a methodology for testing for manager effects that is not subject to the selection critique of Fee, Hadlock, and Pierce (2013). Received March 30, 2016; editorial decision February 28, 2018 by Editor Itay Goldstein. Editor Itay Goldstein.