Using a sample of U.S. firms from 1995 to 2002, we examine corporate payout policy in dual-class firms. The expropriation hypothesis predicts that dual-class firms pay out less to shareholders because entrenched managers want to maximize the value of assets under control and the private benefits...

This paper focuses on dominant owners' use of leverage to finance their blockholdings and its relationship to dividend policy. We postulate that blockholder leverage may impact payout policy, in particular when earnings are hit by a negative shock. We use panel data for France where blockholders...

This paper focuses on dominant owners' use of leverage to finance their blockholdings and its relationship to dividend policy. We postulate that blockholder leverage may impact payout policy, in particular when earnings are hit by a negative shock. We use panel data for France where blockholders...

This paper introduces the Journal of Multinational Financial Management's special issue on financial management in China. We provide a brief literature review of China's financial management policies, practices, and recent research findings, and describe how papers published in this special...

A recent dramatic rise in the assets managed by passive corporate debt funds has profound implications for firm financing and payout policy. I use fund-specific flows to isolate exogenous increases in firm-level passive debt ownership at a firm. Firms respond to higher levels of passive debt...

We provide the first firm-level evidence of the relation between state ownership and debt structure. Using an international sample of newly privatized firms (NPFs) from 76 countries over the 1998–2017 period, we find that state ownership is associated with a more diversified debt structure....

Investor-driven "short-termism" is said to harm EU public firms' ability to invest for the long term, prompting calls for the EU to better insulate managers from shareholder pressure. But the evidence offered---rising levels of repurchases and dividends---is incomplete and misleading: it ignores...

This paper surveys the literature on payout policy. We start out by discussing several stylized facts that are important to the development of any comprehensive payout policy framework. We then describe the Miller and Modigliani (1961) payout irrelevance proposition, and consider the effect of...

Firms that follow excessive payout policies (over-payers) are higher on the financial distress spectrum and have lower survival rates than under-payers. In addition, over-payers endure lower future sales and asset growth than under-payers and experience negative abnormal returns in the bond and...

We examine how product market competition and financing constraints influence firm payout policy. Using Compustat firms for the period 1996 to 2017, we show that competition decreases firms' propensity to make payouts via dividends more if the firm is financially constrained. These results are...