Tag Archive for: david hirshleifer

Featured Collaborator for November: David Hirshleifer

Interview with David Hirshleifer, Professor of Finance and Merage Chair in Business Growth, University of California-Irvine

What are your main areas of research?

I do research in behavioral finance, economics, accounting, and social science more generally. My main focus in recent years has been on how social interactions affect behavior, and on the cultural transmission of beliefs and behavior.

​Opportunism as a Managerial Trait

We ordinarily think of people as honest or dishonest, a broad-brush description which implicitly assumes that honesty is a personal characteristic that generalizes across decision domains. If so, a student who cheats on an exam is also more likely to shoplift or lie to a friend or partner. Does knowing that a corporate manager is opportunistic in one decision domain tell us much about whether the manager will misbehave in some other domain? In other words, are some managers just `bad apples’? 

Recently, in the paper “Opportunism as a Managerial Trait: Predicting Insider Trading Profits and Misconduct” Usman Ali, Portoflio Manager at MIG Capital, and I study these questions by examining whether corporate managers who profit by insider trading in their firms’ stocks engage in other forms of misbehavior as well.

2014 Highlights from Our Collaborators

2014 was a busy year. Here are some of the highlights from our collaborators. Dan Ariely’s work on cheating and honesty is being turned into a documentary called (Dis)Honesty: The Truth about Lies Max Bazerman has a new book called…