Taxes on capital gains are deferred until realization, whereas dividend taxes are levied upon accrual. This often makes dividends tax-disadvantaged relative to share repurchases, which leads to the payout puzzle: why do firms pay dividends? This paper develops a model of corporate payout policy...

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of a 1982 SEC rule that made share buybacks a viable alternative to dividends for paying out funds to shareholders. I propose a quantitative model of heterogeneous firms with dividend adjustment costs and a manager-shareholder conflict, matched to...

Pressure from institutional money managers to generate profits in the short run is often blamed for corporate myopia. Theoretical research suggests that money managers' short term focus stems from their career concerns and greater fund transparency can amplify these concerns. Using a...

A deep-ingrained doctrine in asset pricing says that if an empirical characteristic-return relation is consistent with investor “rationality,” the relation must be “explained” by a risk (factor) model. The investment approach questions the doctrine. Factors formed on characteristics are...

This paper investigates the relationship between demographic changes and the long-run returns of dividend-yield investment strategies in the US. We hypothesise that in a world where components of wealth are mentally treated as being non-fungible, the preference for high dividend-paying stocks by...

The value premium is the empirical observation that low market/book “value” stocks have higher returns than high market/book “growth” stocks. In this paper, we show that the profitability determined relation between risk and return is distinct for non-dividend paying businesses. High...