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Expectations about economic variables vary systematically across genders. In the domain of inflation, women have persistently higher expectations than men. We argue that traditional gender roles are a significant factor in generating this gender expectations gap as they expose women and men to different economic signals in their daily lives. Using unique data on the participation of men and women in household grocery chores, their resulting exposure to price signals, and their inflation expectations, we document a tight link between the gender expectations gap and the distribution of grocery shopping duties. Because grocery prices are highly volatile, and consumers focus disproportionally on positive price changes, frequent exposure to grocery prices increases perceptions of current inflation and expectations of future inflation. The gender expectations gap is largest in households whose female heads are solely responsible for grocery shopping, whereas no gap arises in households that split grocery chores equally between men and women. Our results indicate that gender differences in inflation expectations arise due to social conditioning rather than through differences in innate abilities, skills, or preferences.

Too few institutional investors are prepared to invest in young and innovative companies. This hampers the long-term growth prospects of the German economy. Instead, institutional investors in Germany hold more conservative portfolios than their European counterparts, investing heavily in bonds. Building up supplementary funded pensions and removing barriers to investing in riskier but growth-enhancing activities can help mobilise more growth capital in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show that past inflation experiences strongly predict homeownership within and across countries. First, we collect novel survey data, which reveal inflation protection to be a key motivation for homeownership, especially after high inflation experiences. Second, using household data from 22 European countries, we find that higher exposure to historical inflation predicts higher homeownership rates. We estimate similar associations among immigrants to the United States who experienced different past inflation in their home countries but face the same U.S. housing market. Consistent with the experience effects model, the relationship is strongest in countries with predominantly fixed‐rate mortgages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do security analysts issue overly positive recommendations? We propose a novel empirical strategy to assess the relative importance of the leading explanations: strategic distortion, which reflects incentives to trigger small-investor purchases and please management, and non-strategic distortion, which reflects genuine over-optimism, due to self-selection or credulity. We exploit the concurrent issuance of recommendations and earnings forecasts by the same analyst to distinguish those motivations. While non-strategic distorters express their positive view both in recommendations and in forecasts, strategic distorters issue overly positive recommendations but slightly more negative (“beatable”) forecasts. We find that affiliated analysts who have the most positive recommendations outstanding make the most negative forecasts. The same does not hold for unaffiliated analysts. Affiliated analysts are also more likely to distort forecasts downwards just before earnings announcements, allowing management to beat the forecast. Our findings indicate widespread strategic distortion, though the heterogeneity across analysts is large. We show that strategic distortion is persistent within individual analysts, with potential forensic implications.

We analyze the impact of winning high-profile tournaments on the subsequent behavior of the tournament winner in the context of chief executive officers of U.S. corporations. We find that the firms of CEOs who achieve ”superstar” status via prestigious nationwide awards from the business press subsequently underperform beyond mean reversion. The underperformance of the company stock holds both relative to the overall market and relative to a sample of ”hypothetical award winners” with matching firm and CEO characteristics. We also find underperformance in accounting returns. At the same time, award-winning CEOs extract significantly higher compensation following the award, both in absolute amounts and relative to other top executives in their firm. They also spend significantly more time and effort on public and private activities outside their company such as assuming board seats or writing books. Our results suggest that media-induced superstar culture leads to behavioral distortions. The distortions are strongest in firms with weak corporate governance, suggesting that firms could prevent the negative consequences.

We analyze how contractibility affects contract design. A major concern when designing research agreements is that researchers may use their funding to subsidize other projects. We show that, when research activities are not contractible, an option contract is optimal. The financing firm obtains the option to terminate the agreement and, in case of termination, broad property rights. The threat of termination deters researchers from cross-subsidization, and the cost of exercising the termination option deters the financing firm from opportunistic termination. We test this prediction using 580 biotechnology research agreements. Contracts with termination options are more common when research is non-contractible.