Around the world (with the U.S. and U.K. as exceptions) concentrated ownership structures and controlling shareholders are predominant even among listed firms. We provide novel empirical evidence how such controlling shareholders, in particular founding families, affect payout policy decisions....

There is an ongoing debate in the literature whether the positive stock price effects to the announcement of a dividend increase or a share repurchase should be explained by the information-signalling hypothesis or the managerial discretion hypothesis of by both of them. We propose a new study...

Based on a large panel data set of listed German firms we analyze the corporate payout behavior around the German Tax Reduction Act 2001 (GTRA). The GTRA considerably changed the tax preference of shareholders and consequently affected the attractiveness of different forms of payout. Using the...

Tax codes regularly create conflicts of interests between small and large shareholders with respect to the payout decision of firms. We use this fact to study (i) whether firm behavior reflects preferences of blockholders and (ii) the effectiveness of minority shareholder protection on...

This paper analyzes how the predominant example of a controlling shareholder, i.e., the firms' founders and their families, influence payout policy. Using a panel dataset of 660 listed firms in the 1995 to 2006 period from Germany, we find that family firms exhibit a higher propensity and level...

This study examines how family firm characteristics affect capital structure decisions. In our analysis we disentangle the influence of three distinct components of a family firm: ownership, supervisory and management board activities by the founding family. Thereby, we use a unique panel...

Market liquidity risk, the difficulty or cost of trading assets in crises, has been recognized as an important factor in risk management. Literature has already proposed several models to include liquidity risk in the standard Value-at-Risk framework. While theoretical comparisons between those...

In January 2010 the Deutsche Börse Group introduced two family firm stock indices. Both indices are calculated as price and performance indices and extend the number of investment strategy indices of Deutsche Börse Group. The DAXplus Family is an all-share index whereas the DAXplus Family 30...

We analyse to what extent the accrual anomaly is related to the choice of the accounting system as well as firm-level heterogeneity in corporate governance mechanisms. Using a unique dataset of listed German firms over the period 1995 to 2005 we first corroborate former results indicating that...

Liquidity, the ease of trading an asset, strongly varies between different sizes of stock positions. We analyze this aspect using the Xetra Liquidity Measure (XLM), which calculates daily, weighted spread for impatient traders transacting against the limit order book. For this measure, we have...