We model a risk-averse firm owner who wants to maximize the intertemporal expected utility of firm’s dividends. The optimal dynamic control problem is characterized by two stochastic state variables: the equity value, and profitability (ROA) of the _rm. According to the empirical evidence, we...

We survey the literature on payout policy, with a particular emphasis on developments in the last two decades. Of the traditional motives of why firms pay out (agency, signaling, and taxes), the cross-sectional empirical evidence is most persuasive in favor of agency considerations. Studies...

Over 40% of firms that make payouts also raise capital during the same year, resulting in 31% of aggregate share repurchases and dividends being externally financed, primarily with debt. Most externally financed payouts are the result of firms persistently setting payouts above free cash flow....

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...

We study whether CEO political ideology affected how S&P 500 firms reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic, an exogenous shock to demand and supply. We hypothesize that conservative CEOs are more likely to adopt shareholder-friendly than employee-friendly reactions to the pandemic. Hence, they should...

Dividend payment policy is a significant issue of neoclassical theories of finance. One of the concepts which poses a challenge to the neoclassical approach to dividend payment policy is behavioural finance, including a catering theory of dividends. The aim of the article is to examine whether...

We study the dividend payouts of U.S. banks during the 2008 financial crisis. Using a difference-in-differences methodology, we shows that banks with higher share of short-term liabilities to total liabilities, which were thus more exposed to the rollover crisis that took place in 2008,...

Economic literature suggests that banks change their dividend payouts for three main reasons. They may be willing to signal good future profitability to shareholders to address information asymmetry, or use dividends to mitigate the agency costs, or could come under pressure from prudential...

This paper studies the impact of banks' dividend restrictions on the behavior of their institutional investors. Using an identification strategy that relies on the within investor variation and a difference in difference setup, I find that funds permanently decrease their ownership shares at...

This article is centred around the notions of shareholder value orientation and financialisation. Shareholder value orientation is reflected by a high dividend payout ratio applied by firms and the reluctance of firms to finance physical investment via new equity issues. Financialisation is the...