Behavioral Corporate Finance provides new and testable explanations for long-standing corporate-finance puzzles by applying insights from psychology to the behavior of investors, managers, and third parties (e. g., analysts or bankers). This chapter gives an overview of the three leading streams...

Personal experiences of economic outcomes, from global financial crises to individual-level job losses, can shape individual beliefs, risk attitudes, and choices for years to come. A growing literature on experience effects shows that individuals act as if past outcomes that they experienced...

This article establishes four key findings of the growing literature on experience effects in finance: (1) the long-lasting imprint of past experiences on beliefs and risk taking, (2) recency effects, (3) the domain-specificity of experience effects, and (4) imperviousness to information that is...

Firms frequently fail to adopt profitable business opportunities even when they do not face informational or liquidity constraints. We explore three behavioral frictions that explain inertia among individuals--present bias, limited memory, and distrust--in a managerial setting. In partnership...

One of the fastest-growing areas of finance research is the study of managerial biases and their implications for firm outcomes. Since the mid-2000s, this strand of behavioral corporate finance has provided theoretical and empirical evidence on the influence of biases in the corporate realm,...

We estimate the long-term effects of experiencing high levels of job demands on the mortality and aging of CEOs. The estimation exploits variation in takeover protection and industry crises. First, using hand-collected data on the dates of birth and death for 1,605 CEOs of large, publicly-listed...

Cash- and stock-financed takeover bids induce strikingly different target revaluations. We exploit detailed data on unsuccessful takeover bids between 1980 and 2008, and show that targets of cash offers are revalued on average by +15% after deal failure, whereas stock targets return to their...

The composition and functioning of corporate boards is at the core of the academic and policy debate on optimal corporate governance. But does board composition matter for corporate decisions? In this paper, we analyze the role of financial experts on boards. In a novel panel data set on board...

We analyze the long-term effects of living under communism and its anticapitalist doctrine on households' financial investment decisions and attitudes towards financial markets. Utilizing comprehensive German brokerage data and bank data, we show that, decades after Reunification, East Germans...

Inflation expectations are central to economics because they affect the effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policy as well as realized inflation. We survey the recent literature with a focus on the inflation expectations of households. We first review standard data sources and discuss their...