This study provides empirical evidence on the relationship between dividend payout ratios, executive compensation and agency costs in Italy. Corporate governance in Italy is distinguished by the fact that a large number of Italian firms are family-controlled, which may theoretically reduce...

Traditional finance theories assume that investors are risk averse whereas in reality investors exhibit both risk averse and risk seeking behaviors. For example the same individual could be purchasing insurance (risk averse) and lottery ticket (risk seeking) simultaneously. We propose that the...

Empirical modeling of dividends has been dominated by Lintner (1956). However, Lintner's model suffers from the logical paradox that if companies have target payout ratios then in the steady state the companies will have reached those target payout ratios. Moreover as demon-strated by Bond and...

Using a theoretical extension of the Friedman and Savage (1948) utility function developed in Bhattacharyya (2003), we predict that for financial assets with negative expected returns, expected return will be a declining and convex function of skewness. Using a sample of U.S. state lottery...

Most universities solicit feedback from students at the end of a course in order to assess student perceptions of the course. This feedback is used for various objectives, including for evaluating teaching by academic administrators. One would therefore expect faculty to rationally take this...

We survey managers from 16 European countries to examine cross-country determinants of payout policy. We find that European managers' views on dividend policy are driven largely by factors similar to that of their U.S. peers. They strongly agree with Lintner's findings that dividends are...

The accounting and mutual fund scandals of the last few years have led to increased scrutiny over the information provided by financial services to investors. These scandals have cast doubt on the supposedly honest and impartial reporting of facts by the financial industry. This paper looks at...