When determining a stock to buy, Strahilevitz et al. (2011) demonstrate that individual investors often repurchase a stock previously traded for a profit as a learning process. When evaluating a decision, people use the most available information that comes to mind. We posit that the most...

Share buybacks have become common practice across U.S corporations. This paper shows that firms finance these operations mostly through newly issued corporate bonds, and that the exogenous variation in the cost of debt – due to innovations in monetary policy – is key in explaining managers'...

Recently, reinforcement has been identified as an important driver of stock repurchasing decisions. We enrich the existing reinforcement model of repurchasing by an aspiration-based market benchmark. Reinforcement relative to an adaptive benchmark is a well-established model of behavior in...

Firms added to the S&P 500 index join a prestigious and exclusive club. They want to fit in the club, which creates a “keeping up with the Joneses” effect. Firms pay more attention to their index peers after inclusion and their investment, external financing, and payouts comove more with...

We show that mutual fund managers' trading experiences bias their future repurchasing decisions. Specifically, a fund is 17% more likely to repurchase a stock when it previously sold the stock for a gain rather than for a loss. Fund managers still prefer to repurchase stocks they sold for a gain...

We find that institutions with short and long investment horizons have different effects on corporate payout policy. Firms with higher long (short) term institutional holdings are more (less) likely to pay dividends and tend to have larger (smaller) dividend payouts. Although high long-term...

Share buybacks have become common practice across U.S corporations. This paper shows that firms finance these operations mostly through newly issued corporate bonds, and that the exogenous variation in the cost of debt -due to innovations in monetary policy- is key in explaining managers'...

Diverging beliefs about the impact of climate policy on the value of fossil fuel assets can lead investors to different valuations of fossil fuel companies. This paper models the share price formation in a market where one group of investors systematically overestimate future prices, and...

The past two decades have witnessed a sharp surge in corporate equity payout. The annual net equity payout of non-financial public companies in the U.S. averaged $525 billion (in 2010 dollars) per year from 2004 to 2019, compared to only $141 billion during the prior 17-year period. Using...

We investigate the impact on firms of joining the S&P 500 index from 1997 to 2017. We find that the positive announcement effect on the stock price of index inclusion has disappeared and the long-run impact of index inclusion has become negative. Inclusion worsens stock price informativeness and...