Are CEO Overconfidence and Audit Firm Size Related To Tax Avoidance?

CEO Overconfidence and Innovation

Are CEOs’ attitudes and beliefs linked to their firms’ innovative performance? This paper uses Malmendier and Tate’s measure of overconfidence, based on CEO stockoption exercise, to study the relationship between a CEO’s “revealed beliefs” about future performance and standard measures of corporate innovation. We begin by developing a career concern model where CEOs innovate to provide evidence...

Tax Avoidance , Corporate Transparency , and Firm Value

CEO Overconfidence and Corporate Investment∗

We argue that managerial overconfidence can account for corporate investment distortions. Overconfident managers overestimate the returns to their investment projects and view external funds as unduly costly. Thus, they overinvest when they have abundant internal funds, but curtail investment when they require external financing. We test the overconfidence hypothesis, using panel data on person...

CEO Overconfidence Effects on Mergers and Acquisitions

The purpose of the study is to extend further from the result studying overconfidence effects of CEOs on single deal of Malmendier and Tate (2008)’s article to study overconfidence effects of CEOs on multiple mergers and acquisitions. Based on the psychological and financial theories, the likelihood of overconfident CEOs acquiring a company is the net effect of two manifestations of overconfide...

Management Ownership and Audit Firm Size

The finance literature identifies two agency problems between managers and outside shareholders. First, there is a divergence-of-interests problem as management ownership falls. Second, there is an offsetting entrenchment problem when management ownership increases within intermediate regions of ownership. Agency problems are mitigated through contracting, but contracts are often based on accou...