We review recent evidence and future directions for empirical research on financial contracting in the context of corporate finance. Specifically, we survey evidence pertaining to incentive conflicts, control rights, collateral, renegotiation, and interactions between financial contracts and...

We survey the literature on payout policy, with a particular emphasis on developments in the past two decades. The cross-sectional empirical evidence for the traditional motivations behind firms paying out (agency, signaling, and taxes) is most persuasive with regard to agency considerations....