We examine whether professional money managers overreact to large climatic disasters. We find that managers within a major disaster region underweight disaster zone stocks to a much greater degree than distant managers and that this aversion to disaster zone stocks is related to a salience bias that decreases over time and distance from the disaster, rather than to superior information possessed by close managers. This overreaction can be costly to fund investors for some especially salient disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes: a long-short strategy that exploits the overreaction generates a significant DGTW-adjusted return over the following 2 years.

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We document a political cycle in the investment decisions of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) by using the constitutionally mandated election schedule in India as a source of exogenous variation in politicians’ incentive to cater to voters. Using a project-level investment database, we find that SOEs announce more capital expenditure projects in election years, especially in infrastructure, and in districts with close elections, high-ranking politicians, and left-wing incumbents. SOE projects in election years have negative announcement returns, suggesting a loss in shareholder value. These patterns are not seen in nongovernment firms or in off-election years. (JEL G31, G38, D72, D73, P16) Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

Using hand-collected data on division manager (DM) pay contracts, we document that DM pay is related to the performance of both the DM’s division and the other divisions in the firm. There is substantial heterogeneity in DM pay for performance. DM pay for division performance is lower in industries with less informative accounting earnings. DM pay is more sensitive to other-division performance if the DM’s division is related to the rest of the firm, if the DM’s division has fewer growth opportunities, and if the DM’s division receives less capital from the rest of the firm. Consistent with optimal contracting view, DMs receive greater pay for other-division performance in better-governed firms. Overall, our evidence suggests that DM compensation is structured to account for the information and agency problems in multidivision firms. The Internet appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2672 . This paper was accepted by Amit Seru, finance.