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CEO Overconfidence and Corporate Investment

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Author Info
Ulrike Malmendier
Geoffrey Tate
Abstract

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 personal portfolio and corporate investment decisions of Forbes 500 CEOs. We classify CEOs as overconfident if they persistently fail to reduce their personal exposure to company-specific risk. We find that investment of overconfident CEOs is significantly more responsive to cash flow, particularly in equity-dependent firms.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 10807.

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Date of creation: Oct 2004
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10807

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
G31 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Capital Budgeting; Investment Policy
G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Capital and Ownership Structure
D21 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior
D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights

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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Manju Puri & David Robinson, 2005. "Optimism and Economic Choice," NBER Working Papers 11361, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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