Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Behavioral Finance: Its History And Its Future, Robert Christopher Hammond

Selected Honors Theses

The field of behavioral finance has attempted to explain a litany of biases, heuristics, and

inefficiencies present in financial markets since its creation in the 1980’s. This paper is structured as a comprehensive literature review of behavioral finance, and includes both the seminal works as well as more recent papers. The various subtopics of behavioral finance will also be analyzed, which include loss aversion, corporate finance, and momentum/contrarian investing. Finally, this paper will draw unique conclusions across behavioral finance and hypothesize about what topics within behavioral finance are likely to yield the most interesting research in the near future.

Three Essays On Dividend Policy, Mehmet Deren Caliskan

Finance Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation considers paying earnings out as dividends a conservative policy as opposed to investing earnings in to value-increasing projects. Based on this view, this dissertation explores the effect of chief executive officers’ (CEO) risk preferences on dividend policy, market’s reaction to dividend policy changes, and the effect of dividend policy on firm financial distress. The first chapter hypothesizes that risk seeking CEOs will be less likely to pay dividends compared to conservative CEOs. The second chapter hypothesizes that when the market sentiment is high (i.e., when investors are willing to take risk) firms that omit dividends should outperform the …