This paper studies the impact of career concerns on technological change by analyzing the adoption of digital cinematography in the US motion picture industry. This setting allows us to collect rich data on the adoption of this new technology at the project-level (i.e., movie) as well as on the career of the main decision maker (i.e., director who can be viewed as project manager). We find that early career directors played a leading role in the adoption of digital technology and that this effect appears to be explained by career concerns, rather than alternative motives we consider and analyze. This finding contrasts with herding observed in early-stage finance industry professionals, Technological savvy also plays a role in the decision to go digital.

We investigate whether the quality of investors’ information across horizons influences corporate investment. In our theory, managers under-invest because their stock price imperfectly reflects the value created by their projects. This effect is stronger when there is a mismatch between the horizon of the projects' cash flows and the horizon at which investors obtain information. Using a new hand-collected measure of projects' horizon, we find that improvements in the quality of investors' long-term (short-term) information induce firms with long-term (short-term) projects to invest more, particularly when managers prioritize current stock prices. Hence, the quality of investors’ information across horizons matters.

Price discovery in financial markets guides the efficient allocation of resources. Yet we argue that speculators uninformed about firms' fundamentals can profit from distorting the allocative function of prices by inflating stock prices. Such speculation can be profitable because high valuations attract employees, business partners, and investors who create value at targeted firms at the cost of diverting resources away from better firms. The resulting resource misallocation is worst in "normal" (neither hot nor cold) markets and when firms offer stakeholders performance compensation or equity. Investors, such as VCs, can also profit from inflating firm valuations in private markets.