Leadership & Organizational Behavior

Stocks with recent past high idiosyncratic volatility have low future average returns around the world. Across 23 developed markets, the difference in average returns between the extreme quintile portfolios sorted on idiosyncratic volatility is -1:31% per month, after controlling for world market, size, and value factors. The effect is individually significant in each G7 country. In the United States, we rule out explanations based on trading frictions, information dissemination, and higher moments.

Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone are so smart, why are their stocks long-term losers?

Existing empirical research and theory suggests that narcissistic individuals engage in self-regulatory processes aimed at minimizing vulnerability during social interactions. We investigate this tendency of narcissists to minimize vulnerability in social interactions by examining their physiological reactivity during a social evaluative task, predicting that narcissists would be highly responsive to social feedback and particularly defensive to rejecting feedback.

When it comes to the local economy, the local government wears more than one hat: it regulates land use and owns real property and has the authority to exercise the power of eminent domain. Each of these legal powers affects local real estate markets in ways that reach beyond local government's role as tax collector and provider of public goods and services. At different times and for different purposes, planners attempt to harness or to stimulate the forces of supply and demand in real estate markets.

This monograph focuses on the use of incomplete contracting models to study transfer pricing. Intrafirm pricing mechanisms affect division managers' incentives to trade intermediate products and to undertake relationship-specific investments so as to increase the gains from trade. Letting managers negotiate over the transaction is known to cause holdup (underinvestment) problems. Yet, in the absence of external markets, negotiations frequently outperform cost-based mechanisms, because negotiations aggregate cost and revenue information more efficiently into prices.

We investigate how nonfinancial performance measures (NPMs) can be used to encourage cooperation across divisions. The implementation of a project often requires joint efforts by multiple divisions. However, privately informed division managers sometimes find it in their self-interest to forgo profitable joint projects or to underinvest in relationship-specific assets.

Trevor Harris and his colleagues at Morgan Stanley have developed ModelWare, which attempts to assess the intrinsic value of enterprises. In this part, they begin with adjustments to reported accounting data, attempting to move accounting metrics closer to economic reality for each company. They then apply the basic concepts of the discounted cash flow approach described in Part I, such as the tradeoff between risk and reward, and consider the components of return on equity, including operating margins, asset turnover, and financial leverage.

As the record of Fed interventions from December 2007 to December 2008 make abundantly clear, a foremost concern of monetary authorities in responding to the financial crisis has been to avoid a repeat of the great depression, and especially a repeat of the monetary contraction identified as the major cause of the 1930s depression.