We examine whether mutual fund managers have differential skill in the buy and sell domains. Although they have characteristic-timing ability in aggregate, we show they exhibit asymmetric ability when buying and selling. Our key finding is that fund managers with superior selling ability are...

Extreme negative events adversely influence people's sentiment and induce pessimism in risk assessments in unrelated domains. Motivated by this finding, we examine whether managers of firms located in close proximity to terrorist attacks and mass shootings become more pessimistic and choose more...

We show that name-induced stereotypes affect the investment choices of U.S. mutual fund investors. Managers with foreign-sounding names have about 10% lower annual fund flows and this effect is stronger among funds with investor clienteles more likely to be suspicious of foreigners. Foreign-name...

We demonstrate that personal political preferences of corporate managers influence corporate policies. Specifically, Republican managers who are likely to have conservative personal ideologies adopt and maintain more conservative corporate policies. Those firms have lower levels of corporate...

This paper examines whether the corporate decisions of S&P 500 CEOs are influenced by spousal risk preferences. We hand-collect data on the cultural origins of CEOs and their spouses to measure within-marriage transmission of cultural norms. We find that spousal risk preference influences a...