We examine whether the decision to participate in the stock market and other related portfolio decisions are influenced by income hedging motives. Economic theory predicts that the market participation propensity should increase as the correlation between income growth and stock market returns...

This paper examines whether political activism increases people's propensity to participate in the stock market. Our key conjecture is that politically active people follow political news more actively, which increases their chance of being exposed to financial news. Consequently, their...

This study investigates whether geographic variation in religion-induced gambling norms affects aggregate market outcomes. We conjecture that gambling propensity would be stronger in regions with higher concentrations of Catholics relative to Protestants. Consistent with our conjecture, we show...

We examine the effect of behavioral biases on the mutual fund choices of a large sample of US discount brokerage investors using new measures of attention to news, tax awareness, and fund-level familiarity bias, in addition to behavioral and demographic characteristics of earlier studies....

We investigate the impact of geography on agency costs and firm dividend policies. We argue that remote firm location increases the cost of shareholder oversight of managerial investment decisions. We hypothesize that remotely located firms facing free cash flow problems precommit to higher...

We examine how state antitakeover laws affect bondholders and the cost of debt, and report four findings. First, bonds issued by firms incorporated in takeover-friendly states have significantly higher at-issue yield spreads than bonds issued by firms in states with restrictive antitakeover...