We explore how bond investors view corporate cash distributions through dividends and how that view influences corporate cost of debt. Explaining between 45 and 67 percent of variance in credit spreads at the time of issuance, our model reveals a non-linear association between dividend payouts...

We contribute to the literature on dividend policy by relaxing Miller and Modigliani's (1961) perfect capital market assumptions and incorporating a factor that has not been investigated before, i.e. variation in managerial ability. Based on more than 24,000 observations across over 20 years...

Theory suggests that religious piety is associated with greater risk aversion and more conservative financial policies. Returns to shareholders through dividends are much more certain than returns through capital gains expected to be realized far into the future. We hypothesize that religious...

CEOs are “lucky” when they are granted stock options on days when the stock price is lowest in the month of the grant, implying opportunistic timing and severe agency problems (Bebchuk et al., 2010). Using idiosyncratic volatility as our measure of stock price informativeness, we find that...

CEOs are “lucky” when they receive stock option grants on days when the stock price is the lowest in the month of the grant, implying opportunistic timing. Extending the work of Bebchuk et al. (2010), we explore the effect of overall corporate governance quality on CEO luck. Provided by the...

This study investigates how debt maturity structure is influenced by the strength of shareholder rights. The empirical evidence reveals an inverse relation between the strength of shareholder rights and debt maturity. We contend that managers of firms with weak shareholder rights eschew choosing...

Motivated by agency theory, we investigate how a firm’s overall quality of corporate governance affects its dividend policy. Using a large sample of firms with governance data from The Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), we find that firms with stronger governance exhibit a higher...

As part of corporate social responsibility, companies invest in activities that promote human rights or refrain from activities that violate human rights. Investments in human rights, however, usually do not yield immediate benefits. Rather, they are expected to improve the reputation of the...

Motivated by the debate on gender inequality, we study CEO gender and CEO age. Because women face significantly more obstacles in advancing their careers, it may take them longer to reach the top position, i.e. the chief executive officer (CEO). If this is the case, female CEOs should be older...

We investigate the extent of earnings management during the financial crisis of 2008 (The Great Recession). Based on a large sample of over 14,000 observations across 15 years, our results show that firms managed earnings less aggressively during the crisis. We also show a severe decline in firm...