This paper studies the costs and benefits of information acquisition and its influence on a firm's financial policies. Acquiring additional information improves learning about investment opportunities, thereby mitigating underinvestment, increasing borrowing, and encouraging higher payout....

Modigliani and Miller showed that the market value of the company is independent of its capital structure, and suggested that dividend policy makes no difference to this law of one price. We experimentally test the MM theorem in a complete market with two simultaneously traded assets, employing...

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...

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...

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...

In the dual model, the surplus of a company is a Levy process with sample paths that are skip-free downwards. In this paper, the aggregate gains process is the sum of a shifted compound Poisson process and an independent Wiener process. By means of Laplace transforms, it is shown how the...

This paper provides a dissection of the Collateralized Loan Obligation (CLO) market and examines the significance of covenants in facilitating the provision of credit. Since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, the leveraged loan market has witnessed unprecedented growth. CLOs play an...

Textbook theory assumes that firm managers maximize the net present value of future cash flows. But when you ask them, the people running large public corporations say that they are maximizing something else entirely: earnings per share (EPS). Perhaps this is a mistake. No matter. We take...

Modigliani and Miller (M&M) proposed that investors forgo dividends, leaving the money available for reinvestment as retained earnings. This recommendation takes two parts: Proposition III, i.e., a dividend has no impact on market value, and Proposition IV, i.e., that financial policy is of no...

This study examines the factors that impact the dividend payout ratio of Turkish firms that are listed in Borsa Istanbul-100 Index for the period 2005-2013. Random-effect Tobit panel regression is used in order to investigate the determinants of dividend policy. According to the empirical...