How do expectation biases causally affect households’ financial decisions? We exploit a unique setting and study the repayment decision in solar loans, in which households borrow to purchase and install solar photovoltaic (PV) systems. Electricity production – the benefit that solar panels generate – primarily depends on sunshine duration. This creates exogenous within-person across-period variation in recent signals that borrowers observe and thereby expectations of future electricity production. We find that a one-standard-deviation decrease in sunshine duration in the week right before the repayment date leads to a 20.8% increase of delinquency, even though deviated past sunshine duration does not predict that in the future. Survey evidence shows that agents make more positive forecasts of future electricity production after experiencing longer sunshine duration in the past week. We examine a battery of alternative explanations and rule out mechanisms based on liquidity constraints and wealth effects.

Various studies have been done on wealth effects and financial performance of firms in different countries but have yielded mixed results. Data on completed deals of Cross-border Mergers and Acquisitions (CBMAs) comprising public listed firms with more than ten percent of share acquisition in five East Asian countries were analysed using event study and key financial ratios. Although the results for average abnormal returns in Indonesia and Korea were inconclusive, the results for Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines suggest that the market had reacted positively adding value to the target firms at merger announcements. There was a significant improvement in targets’ free cash flow after CBMAs when compared to both before CBMAs and also control firms after CBMAs. The results also reveal that that these five East Asian countries have moved towards more efficient markets.

We examine the wealth effects of three regulatory changes designed to improve minority-shareholder protection in the Chinese stock markets. Using the value of a firm's related-party transactions as an inverse proxy for the quality of corporate governance, we find that firms with weaker governance experienced significantly larger abnormal returns around announcements of the new regulations than did firms with stronger governance. This evidence indicates that securities-market regulation can be effective in protecting minority shareholders from expropriation in a country with weak judicial enforcement. We also find that firms with strong ties to the government did not benefit from the new regulations, suggesting that minority shareholders did not expect regulators to enforce the new rules on firms where block holders have strong political connections.

We explore the source of managerial hubris in mergers and acquisitions by examining the history of deals made by individual acquirers. We find that compared to their first deals, acquirers of second and higher-order deals experience significantly more negative announcement effects. We also find that while acquisition likelihood increases in the performance associated with previous acquisitions, previous positive performance does not curb the negative wealth effects associated with future deals. We interpret these results as consistent with self-attribution bias leading to overconfidence. We also find evidence that the market anticipates future deals based on an acquirer's acquisition history and impounds such anticipation into stock prices.