Prior research has addressed the question of whether certain events cause a transfer of wealth between stockholders and bondholders but does not control for the events’ impacts on firms’ credit risk. This may explain why many studies fail to identify wealth transfers. By employing...

Firms with high agency costs of overinvestment have significantly more positive dividend initiation announcement returns than other firms do. This paper presents the results from three experiments consistent with this conclusion: (i) dividend initiation announcement returns are significantly...

This paper studies the relationship between companies' choice of capital structure and their stock market returns from a corporate governance perspective. A portfolio buying low-levered, zero payout stocks and selling high-levered, zero payout stocks earned abnormal returns of 8.5% per year from...

In this paper, we examine the relationship between managerial stock option holdings and the decision to announce a repurchase of the firm's common stock. Managerial stock option holdings should reinforce the traditional undervaluation, free cash flow and capital structure motives for...

While strong shareholder control benefits the firm by preventing Free-Cash-Flow problems in the good state of business cycles, it is costly to the firm in exacerbating the Conflict-of-Interest problem between shareholders and creditors in the bad state. Investigating how firm financial policies...

We provide evidence suggesting that both the post-repurchase long-term abnormal returns and the reported improvement in operating performance documented in prior studies are driven, at least partly, by pre-repurchase downward earnings management, rather than genuine growth in profitability. The...

We hypothesize that announcing open market share repurchases (OMRs) to counter negative valuation shocks reveals repurchasing firms’ lost growth opportunities or underperforming assets to potential bidders, making them more likely to become takeover targets. This also leads their investors to...

In this paper, we assess which firm-characteristics are associated with a firm's decision to announce a share repurchase programme in a cross-country framework. In the models, we incorporate firm-specific financial characteristics and measures of share price performance. We find that size, cash...

The well-documented abnormal long-run buy-and-hold returns to firms issuing equity in initial public offerings and seasoned equity offerings, firms bidding in mergers, and firms initiating dividends can be attributed to imperfect control-firm matching. In addition to firm size and market-to-book...

We analyze the decision to announce an open market share repurchase and the share price reaction to the announcement. We use a conditional estimation approach which takes into account that the repurchase decision is made rationally and that, consequently, there is a potential selection bias....