We analyze the effect of changes in U.S. state personal exemptions on the financing structure and performance of a representative sample of start-ups. An increase in the amount of borrower’s personal wealth protected in bankruptcy reduces the availability of bank credit to all start-ups....

Homestead exemptions to personal bankruptcy allow households to retain their home equity up to a limit determined at the state level. Households that may experience bankruptcy thus have an incentive to bias their portfolios towards home equity. Using US household data from the Survey of Income...

The financial services sector has internationalized over the last few decades.Important differences and similarities in financial behavior can be anticipated between both consumers within a particular country and those living in different countries.For companies in this market, the appropriate...

We analyze the payout channel choice of listed UK firms and examine whether the choice between dividends, share repurchases, a combination of payout channels, or complete earnings retention is affected by investor sentiment, taxation, major shareholder ownership, and in particular the CEO’s...

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...

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...

We study the tax regulations in relation to dividends and capital gains over the last two decades for the UK in order to determine whether changes in tax regimes affect corporate payout policy (dividends, share repurchases, or a combination). While we can identify investors’ tax-driven...