Scott E. Yonker

The People in Your Neighborhood: Social Interactions and Mutual Fund Portfolios

We find that socially connected fund managers have more similar holdings and trades. The overlap of funds whose managers reside in the same neighborhood is considerably higher than that of funds whose managers live in the same city but in different neighborhoods. These effects are larger when managers share a similar ethnic background, and are not explained by preferences. Valuable information is transmitted through these peer networks: a long‐short strategy composed of stocks purchased minus sold by neighboring managers delivers positive risk‐adjusted returns. Unlike prior empirical work, our tests disentangle the effects of social interactions from community effects.

Geography and the Market for CEOs

I examine the role of geography in the market for CEOs and find that firms hire locally five times more often than expected if geography were irrelevant to the matching process. This local matching bias is widespread and exists even among the largest U.S. firms. Tests reveal that both labor supply and demand influence local matching. Compensation and unforced turnover are lower for local than for non-local CEOs, and unlike non-local CEOs, the compensation of locals depends on local labor market factors. These findings suggest the presence of market segmentation and contrast with much of the prior literature which explicitly or implicitly assumes a single national market.

Board Diversity, Firm Risk, and Corporate Policies

We examine the effects of diversity in the board of directors on corporate policies and risk. Using a multidimensional measure, we find that greater board diversity leads to lower volatility and better performance. The lower risk levels are largely due to diverse boards adopting more persistent and less risky financial policies. However, consistent with diversity fostering more efficient (real) risk-taking, firms with greater board diversity also invest persistently more in research and development (R&D) and have more efficient innovation processes. Instrumental variable tests that exploit exogenous variation in firm access to the supply of diverse nonlocal directors indicate that these relations are causal.

Do Local Managers Give Labor an Edge

Based on the psychological theory of place attachments, managers favor hometown workers over others. Consistent with this prediction, I find that following periods of industry distress, establishments located near CEOs’ childhood homes see fewer employment and pay reductions and are less likely to be divested relative to other establishments within firms. While there is no direct evidence that this employment bias destroys firm value, managers only implement these policies when governance is weak, suggesting that this favoritism is suboptimal. Together these results provide direct evidence of employee favoritism and show that the idiosyncratic styles of managers impact corporate employment decisions.

Trust Busting: The Effect of Fraud on Investor Behavior

We study the importance of trust in the investment advisory industry by exploiting the geographic dispersion of victims of the Madoff Ponzi scheme. Residents of communities that were exposed to the fraud subsequently withdrew assets from investment advisers and increased deposits at banks. Additionally, exposed advisers were more likely to close. Advisers who provided services that can build trust, such as financial planning advice, experienced fewer withdrawals. Our evidence suggests that the trust shock was transmitted through social networks. Taken together, our results show that trust plays a critical role in the financial intermediation industry. Received April 18, 2016; editorial decision March 8, 2017 by Editor Robin Greenwood.

Hometown Biased Acquisitions

We show that CEOs exhibit home bias in acquisitions. Firms are over twice as likely to acquire targets located in their CEOs’ home states than similar targets domiciled elsewhere. Private home state deals under-perform other private deals and the bias is strongest when acquirer governance is lax, suggesting that CEOs acquire private targets for their own benefits. In contrast, public home-state acquisitions are value-enhancing. The results suggest CEOs create value in public home state acquisitions by avoiding extremely poor deals and through synergies driven by efficient integration. We conclude that both agency issues and hometown advantages drive home state acquisitions.

Do Managers Give Hometown Labor an Edge

In line with the psychological theory of place attachments, managers favor hometown workers over others. Consistent with this prediction, I find that following periods of industry distress, establishments located near CEOs’ childhood homes experience fewer employment and pay reductions and are less likely to be divested relative to other firm establishments. While it is not possible to directly test whether this employment bias destroys firm value, managers only implement these policies when governance is weak, suggesting that this favoritism is suboptimal. Together, these results provide direct evidence of employee favoritism and show that idiosyncratic manager styles impact corporate employment decisions. Received December 23, 2013; editorial decision January 3, 2017 by Editor Alexander Ljungqvist.