Do financial derivatives enhance or impede innovation? We aim to answer this question by examining the relationship between equity options markets and standard measures of firm innovation. Our baseline results show that firms with more options trading activity generate more patents and patent citations per dollar of R&D invested. We then investigate how more active options markets affect firms' innovation strategy. Our results suggest that firms with greater trading activity pursue a more creative, diverse and risky innovation strategy. We discuss potential underlying mechanisms and show that options appear to mitigate managerial career concerns that would induce managers to take actions that boost short-term performance measures. Finally, using several econometric specifications that try to account for the potential endogeneity of options trading, we argue that the positive effect of options trading on firm innovation is causal.

"The conference was organized by the three editors of this book and took place on August 15-16, 2012 in Seattle."--Preface.

The book begins by building upon the established, conventional principles of finance that you've have already learned in your principles course. The authors then move into psychological principles of behavioral finance, including heuristics and biases, overconfidence, emotion and social forces. You immediately see how human behavior influences the decisions of individual investors and professional finance practitioners, managers, and markets. You also gain a strong understanding of how social forces impact individuals' choices. The book clearly explains what behavioral finance indicates about observed market outcomes as well as how psychological biases potentially impact the behavior of managers. The book's solid academic approach provides opportunities for you to utilize theory and complete applications in every chapter as you learn the implications of behavioral finance on retirement, pensions, education, debiasing, and client management. The book spends a significant amount of time examining how today's practitioners can use behavioral finance to further their professional success.