Over the last few years, national and international regulators have taken conscious steps to make capital markets - especially those based in Europe - more shareholder-oriented. On one side, these are welcome initiatives as the recent spectacular corporate failures and anecdotal evidence suggest...

This paper reopens the debate on why firms pay lower dividends in the stakeholder-oriented governance regimes of Continental Europe than in the market-oriented Anglo-American world. Previous studies observe the concentrated ownership structures of Continental European firms, and infer that in...

This paper analyses the decision to change the dividend for a panel of German firms from 1984 to 1994. The period captures an economic boom which followed by a recession. This study comes up with two findings which refine the results by Lintner (1956) and Miller and Modigliani (1961). First, the...

This paper uses managerial control rights data for over 5000 firms from 31 countries to examine the net costs and benefits of cash holdings. We find that when external country-level shareholder protection is weak, firm values are lower when controlling managers hold more cash. Further, when...

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 focuses on dominant owners' use of leverage to finance their blockholdings and its relationship to dividend policy. We postulate that blockholder leverage may impact payout policy, in particular when earnings are hit by a negative shock. We use panel data for France where blockholders...