German firms pay out a lower proportion of their cash flows than UK and US firms.However, on a published profits basis, the pattern is reversed.Company law provisions and accounting policies account for these conflicting results.A partial adjustment model is used to estimate the implicit target...

This paper reopens the debate on the substitutability of dividends and shareholder control in mitigating free cash flow concerns, by examining dividend behavior when shareholder control is restricted in the firm.We consider the stakeholder-oriented governance regime of the Netherlands, where...

This paper examines the payout policies of UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange during the 1990s.It complements the existing literature by analyzing the trends in both dividends and total payouts (including share repurchases).In a dynamic panel data regression setting, we relate target...

German firms pay out a lower proportion of their cash flows, but a higher proportion of their published profits than UK and US firms. We estimate partial adjustment models and report two major findings. First, German firms base their dividend decisions on cash flows rather than published...

The paper examines the payout policy of UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange during the 1990s.We complement the existing payout literature studies by analyzing jointly the trends in dividends and share repurchases.Unlike in the US, we find that, in the UK, firms do not demonstrate a...

This paper provides an overview of existing research on how corporate restructuring affects the wealth of creditors.Restructuring is defined as any transaction that affects the firm's underlying capital structure.Thus, it reaches well beyond asset restructuring and includes transactions such as...

Networks can have an important effect on economic outcomes. Given the complexity of many of these networks, agents will generally not know their structure. We study the sensitivity of game-theoretic predictions to the specification of players’ (common) prior on the network in a setting where...

Networks can have an important effect on economic outcomes. Given the complexity of many of these networks, agents will generally not know their structure. We study the sensitivity of game-theoretical predictions to the specification of players’ (common) prior on the network in a setting where...

Numerous laboratory experiments show that workers reciprocate to high wages with high effort, when there is perfect information on the surplus created. Recent field experiments, however, suggest that trust and reciprocity may be lower or absent when the information is incomplete.We report a...