Firms conduct SEOs to resolve a near-term liquidity squeeze, and not primarily to exploit market timing opportunities. Without the SEO proceeds, 62.6% of issuers would have insufficient cash to implement their chosen operating and non-SEO financing decisions the year after the SEO. Although the...

Why do firms pay dividends? If they didn't their asset and capital structures would eventually become untenable as the earnings of successful firms outstrip their investment opportunities. Had they not paid dividends, the 25 largest long-standing 2002 dividend payers would have cash holdings of...

Proactive deleveraging from all-time peak market leverage (ML) to near-zero ML and negative net debt is the norm among 4,476 nonfinancial firms with five or more years of post-peak data. ML is 0.543 at the historical peak and 0.026 at the later trough for the median firm in this sample, with a...

Most firms deleverage from their historical peak market-leverage (ML) ratios to near-zero ML, while also markedly increasing cash balances to high levels. Among 4,476 nonfinancial firms with five or more years of post-peak data, median ML is 0.543 at the peak and 0.026 at the later trough, with...

Consistent with a lifecycle theory of dividends, the fraction of publicly traded industrial firms that pays dividends is high when retained earnings are a large portion of total equity (and of total assets) and falls to near zero when most equity is contributed rather than earned. We observe a...

Why do firms pay dividends? If they didn't their asset and capital structures would eventually become untenable as the earnings of successful firms outstrip their investment opportunities. Had they not paid dividends, the 25 largest long-standing 2002 dividend payers would have cash holdings of...

A hot growth stock in the 1980s, L.A. Gear's equity fell from $1 billion in market value in 1989 to zero in 1998. For over six years as revenues declined precipitously, management tried a series of radical strategy shifts while subsidizing the firm's large losses through working-capital...

This paper documents that (1) special dividends were once commonly paid by NYSE firms, but are now a rare phenomenon; (2) firms typically paid specials almost as predictably as they paid regulars; and (3) despite the dramatic decline in specials as a whole, the incidence of very large specials...

Although the number of dividend paying industrials declines by more than 50% over the last two decades (Fama and French (2001a)), aggregate real dividends paid by industrials increase over the same period. Dividends increase despite a precipitous decline in the number of payers because (i) the...

This paper gauges the importance of market timing for the decision to conduct a seasoned equity offering by testing whether SEO decisions are better explained by timing opportunities or by a simple fundamentals-based theory in which firms sell stock primarily in the early stages of their...