French law mandates that employees of publicly listed companies can elect two types of directors to represent employees. Privatized companies must reserve board seats for directors elected by employees by right of employment, while employee-shareholders can elect a director whenever they hold at...

French law mandates that employees of large publicly listed companies be allowed to elect two types of directors to represent employees. First, partially privatized companies must reserve two or three (depending on board size) board seats for directors elected by employees by right of...

We measure flexibility of dividend policy and study its impact on abnormal shareholders' returns in the European Union. When we use relative repurchase frequency and relative repurchase amounts as a measure of flexibility, civil law companies are more flexible. A more frequent use of repurchases...

This paper examines the performance of newly public firms and compares those firms that initiated dividends with those that did not. Earnings increases following the dividend initiation and earnings surprises for initiating firms are more favorable than those for noninitiating firms....

We study dividend policies and dividend flexibility and use the annual abnormal return methodology to investigate the impact of more or less flexible policies for stock returns. We focus on the European Union which accommodates two corporate governance systems. We show that common law companies...

This paper examines empirically whether the dividend initiation decisions of a sample of newly-public firms are best explained by the predictions of the Miller and Rock (1985) cash flow signalling model, or by the competing agency cost models presented by Easterbrook (1984), Jensen (1986), and...

Newly privatized firms increase dividends after divestment, and also pay significantly higher dividends compared to always-private firms. We examine a sample of 83,468 firm-years (358 privatized and 4,894 always-private firms) across 26 countries and show that the dividend premium is...

Using a database of over 4100 listed industrial companies, we examine the evolution of cash dividends and share repurchases from 1989 to 2005 in the fifteen nations that were members of the European Union before May 2004. As in the United States, the fraction of European firms paying dividends...

Using a unique database of over 3400 listed industrial companies, we examine the evolution of dividend policy from 1989 to 2003 in the fifteen nations that were members of the European Union in May 2004. As in the United States, the fraction of European firms paying dividends declines...

Using a unique database of over 3400 listed industrial companies, we examine the evolution of dividend policy from 1989 to 2003 in the fifteen nations that were members of the European Union in May 2004. As in the United States, the fraction of European firms paying dividends declines...