We develop a theory of income and payout smoothing by firms when insiders know more about income than outside shareholders, but property rights ensure that outsiders can enforce a fair payout. Insiders set payout to meet outsiders' expectations and underproduce to manage future expectations...

We consider a setting in which insiders have information about income that outside shareholders do not, but property rights ensure that outside shareholders can enforce a fair payout. To avoid intervention, insiders report income consistent with outsiders' expectations based on publicly...

We develop a theory of income and payout smoothing by firms when insiders know more about income than outside shareholders, but property rights ensure that outsiders can enforce a fair payout. Insiders set payout to meet outsiders' expectations and underproduce to manage downward future...

This study examines whether the CEO uses share repurchases to sell her equity grants at inflated stock prices, a concern regularly voiced in politics and media. We find that the timing of buyback programs and equity compensation, i.e., the granting, vesting, and selling of equity, is largely...

China has sustained a rapid rate of economic growth and absorbed a great deal of foreign investment over the past decades. However, the laws pertaining to business in China have not kept up with China's market growth. For this reason, investors in the Chinese stock market must assess associated...

In this paper we examine the relation between managerial discretion in accruals and informational efficiency. We measure managerial discretion in accruals by the absolute value of discretionary accruals. Assuming that efficient prices follow a random walk, we measure informational efficiency by...

We develop a model of the effect of CEO overconfidence on dividend policy and empirically examine its central predictions. Consistent with our main prediction, we find that the level of dividend payout is lower in firms managed by overconfident CEOs. We document that this reduction in dividends...

Given the increasing use of equity-incentive compensation in Europe, we examine the effects of executive compensation and investor protection on payout policy. We find a negative (positive) relationship between equity-incentive compensation and dividends (repurchases). In countries with weak...

We argue that CEOs have different attitudes toward the firm's stakeholders and that these differences in attitudes affect the firm's decision making. We hypothesize that these differences stem from differences in political ideology: Liberal CEOs, as compared to their conservative...

We examine how firms' dividend policy affects the initial compensation of their newly appointed CEOs. We focus on newly appointed CEOs to isolate the effect of dividends on compensation and to provide new insights into an aspect largely neglected by compensation research. We show that the...