Anecdotal and indirect empirical evidence suggest that excitement and market bubbles are intertwined, such that excitement not only arises during bubbles but may also help fuel them. We directly test the impact of excitement on bubbles in a bubbleprone experimental asset-pricing market (Capinalp, Porter, and Smith, 2001). Prior to trading, participants are assigned to emotion inductions through...

We develop a tractable model of realization utility that studies the role of referencedependent S-shaped preferences in a dynamic investment setting with reinvestment. Our model generates both voluntarily realized gains and losses. It makes specific predictions about the volume of gains and losses, the holding periods, and the sizes of both realized and paper gains and losses that can be calibr...

This paper examines the effects of macro-level disagreement on the cross-section of stock returns. Using forecast dispersion measures from the Survey of Professional Forecasters database as proxies for macro disagreement, I find that highmacro beta stocks earn lower future returns relative to lowmacro beta stocks following highmacro disagreement states. This negative relation between returns fo...

We investigate how personal characteristics affect people’s desire to collaborate and whether this attraction enhances or detracts from performance in venture capital. We find that venture capitalists who share the same ethnic, educational, or career background are more likely to syndicate with each other. This homophily reduces the probability of investment success, and the detrimental effect ...

The literature views aggressive trading behavior as the key for representativeness heuristic traders to survive in competition with rational traders. This paper provides another reason. That is, in this dynamic model of a competitive securities market, representativeness heuristic traders can derive more expected profit from the misvaluations (created by noise traders) than can rational traders...

We use unique worker-plant matched panel data to measure differences in wage changes experienced by workers displaced from closing plants. We observe larger losses among women than men, comparing workers who move from the same closing plant to the same new firm. However, we find a significantly smaller gap in hiring firms with female leadership. The results are strongest among women who are dis...

We investigate the “law of small numbers” using a data set on lotto gambling that allows us to measure players’ reactions to draws. While most players pick the same set of numbers week after week, we find that those who do change, react on average as predicted by the law of small numbers as formalized in recent behavioral theory. In particular, players tend to bet less on numbers that were draw...

Although weather has been shown to affect financial markets and financial decision making, a still open question is the channel through which such influence is exerted. By employing a multiple price list method, this paper provides direct experimental evidence that sunshine and good weather promote risk-taking behavior. This effect is present whether relying on objective measures of meteorologi...

I demonstrate that non-financial corporations act as cross-market arbitrageurs in their own securities. Firms use one type of security to replace another in response to shifts in relative valuations, inducing negatively-correlated financing flows in different markets. Net equity repurchases and net debt issuance both increase when the expected returns on debt are particularly low, or when the e...