Corporations uniquely have a tax preference for cash dividends. Nevertheless, dividends do not increase following trades of large-percentage blocks of stock from individuals to corporations. Moreover, although one-third of firms have corporate blockholders, 68% of these firms pay no dividends,...

Compelling empirical evidence documenting a material effect of corporate taxes on leverage decisions is limited, in part because of difficulties in constructing an effective proxy for the firm's tax benefit of debt. We examine leverage decisions across taxable and nontaxable real estate...

Since the formulation of the M & M irrelevance propositions 40 years ago, financial economists have been debating whether there is such a thing as optimal capital structure-a proportion of debt to equity that maximizes current firm value. Some finance scholars have followed M & M by arguing that...

We examine the effects of trading after hours on the amount and timing of price discovery over the 24-hour day. A high volume of liquidity trade facilitates price discovery. Thus prices are more efficient and more information is revealed per hour during the trading day than after hours. However,...

This paper examines the within day pattern of common stock returns surrounding announcements of new issues of equity and debt by industrial firms. During the first fifteen minutes following new equity issue announcements, there is an abnormally large number of transactions, high volume, and a...