In the corporate finance tradition, starting with Berle and Means (1932), corporations should generally be run to maximize shareholder value. The agency view of corporate social responsibility (CSR) considers CSR an agency problem and a waste of corporate resources. Given our identification...

This paper examines the payout policies of UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange during the 1990s.It complements the existing literature by analyzing the trends in both dividends and total payouts (including share repurchases).In a dynamic panel data regression setting, we relate target...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the dividend policy of German firms is more flexible than the one of their Anglo-American counterparts.This paper analyses the decision to change the dividend for a panel of 221 German firms from 1984 to 1994.The choice of the period of study is motivated by the...

German firms pay out a lower proportion of their cash flows, but a higher proportion of their published profits than UK and US firms. We estimate partial adjustment models and report two major findings. First, German firms base their dividend decisions on cash flows rather than published...

The paper examines the payout policy of UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange during the 1990s.We complement the existing payout literature studies by analyzing jointly the trends in dividends and share repurchases.Unlike in the US, we find that, in the UK, firms do not demonstrate a...

German firms pay out a lower proportion of their cash flows than UK and US firms.However, on a published profits basis, the pattern is reversed.Company law provisions and accounting policies account for these conflicting results.A partial adjustment model is used to estimate the implicit target...

This paper reopens the debate on the substitutability of dividends and shareholder control in mitigating free cash flow concerns, by examining dividend behavior when shareholder control is restricted in the firm.We consider the stakeholder-oriented governance regime of the Netherlands, where...

This paper examines the payout policies of UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange during the 1990s. It complements the existing literature by analyzing the trends in both dividends and total payouts (including share repurchases). In a dynamic panel data regression setting, we relate target...

The paper examines the payout policy of UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange during the 1990s. We complement the existing payout literature studies by analyzing jointly the trends in dividends and share repurchases. Unlike in the US, we find that, in the UK, firms do not demonstrate a...

German firms pay out a lower proportion of their cash flows than UK and US firms. However, on a published profits basis, the pattern is reversed.Company law provisions and accounting policies account for these conflicting results. A partial adjustment model is used to estimate the implicit...