This award provides support under the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator Awards Program. The objectives of this program is to provide research support to the Nation's most outstanding and promising young science and engineering faculty. The awards are intended to improve the capability of U.S. academic institutions to respond to the demand for highly qualified science and engineering personnel for academic and industrial research and teaching. This award will allow the investigator to pursue her research in the area of financial economics. She will continue and extend her work focusing share-holder behavior, risk taking, and stock value. She will examine the inception and disagreement, the strategic manipulation of disagreement, and the effect of stock holder disagreement on firm decision making and the design of securities and corporations. This general line of research will provide a new understanding of the role of the firm, of investor decision making and of securities and their markets. It will also improve our ability to organize and regulate markets, to create financial innovation, and to understand the effects of tax policy on investor and corporate behavior.