Purpose – The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between financial decisions and ownership structure using the control contests on a sample of Italian listed companies.Design/methodology/approach – The analysis adopts a balanced panel data-set of 984 firm-year observations...

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....

The theory of law and finance proposed by La Porta et al. (1998) predicts that minority controlled ownership structures, i.e. the structures that allow voting rights to exceed cash-flow rights, are more frequent in legal contexts where investors are not well protected against the expropriation...

Dividend payouts affect the relative value of claims within a firm. When firms have contingent claims on each other, as in the banking sector, dividend payouts can shift the relative value of stakeholders' claims across firms. Through this channel, one bank's capital policy affects the equity...

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...

We study the importance of owner wages and dividends as alternative payout channels in privately held firms. Using data on all Swedish closely held corporations and their owner-managers over the period 2000 - 2009, we find that dividends comprise one-fourth of total payout to owner-managers....

This work investigates the role of equity ownership for the purpose of committing the management to the pursuit of shareholder value in the presence of separation between ownership and control. By rooting the conflicts of interests between managers and shareholders upon the control of internal...

We investigate dividend smoothing behaviors of approximately 6,000 firms from 28 countries. The data find a wide variation in the extent of dividend smoothing across countries, while US firms smooth dividends the most. Firms with a concentrated ownership structure adjust their dividends quickly,...

This study addresses the debate over the relation between institutional ownership and dividend payout through the lens of the agency theory. We hypothesize that only institutional investors with certain traits are likely to monitor and conditioning on firms' financial performance, they will use...