The paper investigates the incentive effects of performance-vested stock options (PVSOs) in aligning management interests with shareholder wealth. Performance targets attached to option vesting would prevent executives from receiving rewards from outcomes that are unaffected by their effort.Such...

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...

Several studies use the investment - cash flow sensitivity as a measure of financing constraints while some others disagree.The source of this disparity lies mostly in differences in opinion regarding the segregation of severely financially constrained firms from less constrained ones.We examine...

We investigate the investment-cash flow sensitivity of a large sample of the UK listed firms and confirm that investment is strongly cash flow-sensitive.Is this suboptimal investment policy the result of agency problems when managers with high discretion overinvest, or of asymmetric information...

This study looks inside a large retail-banking group to understand how corporate politics affect internal capital allocation. The group consists of a headquarters organization and about 150 member banks which own the headquarters. Our data is from the firm’s managerial accounting system and...

As institutional investors are the largest shareholders in most listed UK firms, one expects them to monitor the firms they invest in. However, there is mounting empirical evidence which suggests that they do not perform any monitoring. This paper provides a new test on whether UK institutional...

This paper studies the relationships between managers’ a¢ liations with Freema- sonry and companies' performance. Using a unique data set of 410 companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange between 1895 and 1902, I find that Masonic managers were associated with greater access to credit in...

This paper investigates the market's reaction to UK insider transactions and analyzes whether the reaction depends on the firm's ownership.There are three major findings.First, differences in regulation between the UK and US, in particular the speedier reporting of trades in the UK, may explain...

This paper revisits the important result of the real options approach to investment under uncertainty, which states that increased uncertainty raises the value of waiting and thus decelerates investment.Typically in this literature projects are assumed to be perpetual.However, in today.s economy...

This paper considers the impact of investment cost asymmetry on the value and optimal real option exercise strategies of firms under imperfect competition.Both firms have an opportunity to invest in a project enhancing (ceteris paribus) the profit now.We show that three types of equilibria exist...