Essays in Empirical Financial Economics.

Summary This thesis consists of four separate chapters. The first chapter presents work written in collaboration with Christophe Spaenjers. We show that individuals with a subjective life expectancy that is longer, have a fraction of conditional actions that is increased.The effect of a decreasing life expectancy is mitigated by legation motives.In the second chapter, I study the importance of birth sequence for financial decisions.I show that elders differ from their siblings in their decisions.The results accentuate the importance of family experiences for agents' choices. In the third chapter, I show that the presence of an entourage decreases the probability of a response, and increases the propensity for exaggerated self-evaluation of ability. This observation implies an underestimation of the importance of aplomb for the behavior of individuals. The fourth chapter is the result of a collaboration with Thomas Bourveau and François Brochet.We identify complaints in which complainants allege that the company hid poor performance related to an acquisition. Using the proclamation of complaints as an industry treatment, we find results consistent with an effect disciplining the investment behavior of other industry executives.