The use of judgmental anchors or reference points in valuing corporations affects several basic aspects of merger and acquisition activity including offer prices, deal success, market reaction, and merger waves. Offer prices are biased towards the 52-week high, a highly salient but largely...

We outline a dividend signaling approach in which rational managers signal firm strength to investors who are loss averse to reductions in dividends relative to the reference point set by prior dividends. Managers with strong but unobservable cash earnings separate themselves by paying high...