An annual loss is essentially a necessary condition for dividend reductions in firms with established earnings and dividend records: 50.9 percent of 167 NYSE firms with losses during 1980-85 reduced dividends, versus 1.0 percent of 440 firms without losses. As hypothesized by Merton H. Miller...

This paper studies the dividend policy adjustments of eighty NYSE firms to protracted financial distress as evidenced by multiple losses during 1980-85. Almost all sample firms reduced dividends, and more than half apparently faced binding debt covenants in years they did so. Absent binding debt...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>Leverage cross-sections more than a few years apart differ markedly, with similarities evaporating as the time between them lengthens. Many firms have high and low leverage at different times, but few keep debt-to-assets ratios consistently above 0.500. Capital structure...</p>

Equilibrium in the standard finance model implies that value-maximizing firms make taxable equity payouts, even when deferral effectively allows complete tax escape. Since tax deferral and consumption deferral are inherently jointly supplied goods, an excess aggregate supply of future...

Agency theories predict that the value of corporate cash holdings is less in countries with poor investor protection because of the greater ability of controlling shareholders to extract private benefits from cash holdings in such countries. Using various specifications of the valuation...

This paper investigates how a foreign firm's decision to cross-list on a U.S. stock exchange is related to the consumption of private benefits of control by its controlling shareholders. Theory has proposed that when private benefits are high, controlling shareholders are less likely to choose...

Foreign firms terminate their Securities and Exchange Commission registration in the aftermath of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) because they no longer require outside funds to finance growth opportunities. Deregistering firms' insiders benefit from greater discretion to consume private benefits...

Defining contagion as correlation over and above that expected from economic fundamentals, we find strong evidence of worst return contagion across hedge fund styles for 1990 to 2008. Large adverse shocks to asset and hedge fund liquidity strongly increase the probability of contagion....