This study investigates the impact of managerial ability on banks' liquidity creation and risk‐taking behavior. We find that higher ability managers create more liquidity and take more risk. During times of financial crisis, however, higher ability bank managers reduce liquidity creation as a way to de‐leverage their balance sheets. Our findings inform recent theoretical and empirical studies that investigate determinants of liquidity creation and risk by introducing managerial ability as a prominent antecedent of the banks' intermediation and risk‐transforming service. Moreover, this study has policy‐related implications, since managerial ability can be quantified as a key performance indicator for prudential supervision of banks and could help regulators to target intervention efforts more purposefully during times of crisis.

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. August 2014Abstract This paper studies the importance of stock market literacy and trust for stock ownership decisions. We …nd that these two distinct channels simultaneously explain not only the probability of participation, but, conditional on participation, also explain the share of investment in stocks. Once we account for stock market literacy, sociability is no longer signi…cant for participation; what matters is literacy rather than sociability. Further, we observe that economic shocks and future expectations are key behavioral characteristics that explain a household's decision to invest in stocks. However, upon participation, a larger set of behavioral characteristics explains the level of stock investment.

Failure to precisely distinguish malignant from healthy tissue has severe implications for breast cancer surgical outcomes. Clinical prognoses depend on precisely distinguishing healthy from malignant tissue during surgery. Laser Raman spectroscopy (LRS) has been previously shown to differentiate benign from malignant tissue in real time. However, the cost, assembly effort, and technical expertise needed for construction and implementation of the technique have prohibited widespread adoption. Recently, Raman spectrometers have been developed for non-medical uses and have become commercially available and affordable. Here we demonstrate that this current generation of Raman spectrometers can readily identify cancer in breast surgical specimens. We evaluated two commercially available, portable, near-infrared Raman systems operating at excitation wavelengths of either 785 nm or 1064 nm, collecting a total of 164 Raman spectra from cancerous, benign, and transitional regions of resected breast tissue from six patients undergoing mastectomy. The spectra were classified using standard multivariate statistical techniques. We identified a minimal set of spectral bands sufficient to reliably distinguish between healthy and malignant tissue using either the 1064 nm or 785 nm system. Our results indicate that current generation Raman spectrometers can be used as a rapid diagnostic technique distinguishing benign from malignant tissue during surgery.

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Jie Michael Guo Durham Univercity Business School, UKThis paper examines whether tone (positive and negative) and volume of firm-specific news media content provide valuable information about future stock returns, using UK news media data from 1981-2010. The results indicate that both tone and volume of news media content significantly predict next period abnormal returns, with the impact of volume more pronounced than tone. Additionally, the predictive power of tone is found to be stronger among lower visibility firms. Further, the paper finds evidence of an attention-grabbing effect for firm-specific news stories with high media coverage, mainly seen among larger firms. A simple news-based trading strategy produces statistically significant risk-adjusted returns of 14.2 to 19 basis points in the period [2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008][2009][2010]. At the aggregate level, price pressure induced by semantics in news stories is corrected only in part by subsequent reversals. Overall, the findings suggest firm-specific news media content incorporates valuable information that predicts asset returns. (JEL: G1, G14, G17)

This study examines the impact of CEO duality on firms’ internal capital allocation efficiency. We observe that when the CEO is also chair of the board, diversified firms make inefficient investments, as they allocate more capital to business segments with relatively low growth opportunities over segments with high growth opportunities. The adverse impact of CEO duality on investment efficiency prevails only among firms that face high agency problems, as captured by high free cash flows, staggered board structure and low board independence. Depending on the severity of the agency problem, CEO duality is associated with a decrease in industry‐adjusted investment in high‐growth segments of 1% to 2.1% over the following year, relative to that in low‐growth segments. However, CEOs’ equity‐based compensation curbs the negative effect of CEO duality on internal capital allocation efficiency. Overall, the findings of this study offer strong support for the agency theory and postulate the internal capital allocation policy as an important channel through which CEO duality lowers firm value in diversified firms.