We survey the literature on payout policy, with a particular emphasis on developments in the past two decades. The cross-sectional empirical evidence for the traditional motivations behind firms paying out (agency, signaling, and taxes) is most persuasive with regard to agency considerations....

We propose a novel approach to measure the value that shareholders assign to financial flexibility. In contrast to existing proxies for financial constraints, our measure is market-based, forward-looking and not directly influenced by past financial decisions. We find that firms for which...

We consider a setting in which insiders have information about income that outside shareholders do not, but property rights ensure that outside shareholders can enforce a fair payout. To avoid intervention, insiders report income consistent with outsiders' expectations based on publicly...

This paper examines the payout policies of UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange during the 1990s.It complements the existing literature by analyzing the trends in both dividends and total payouts (including share repurchases).In a dynamic panel data regression setting, we relate target...

German firms pay out a lower proportion of their cash flows, but a higher proportion of their published profits than UK and US firms. We estimate partial adjustment models and report two major findings. First, German firms base their dividend decisions on cash flows rather than published...

The paper examines the payout policy of UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange during the 1990s.We complement the existing payout literature studies by analyzing jointly the trends in dividends and share repurchases.Unlike in the US, we find that, in the UK, firms do not demonstrate a...

Based on a theoretically correct model we examine the value the market assigns to different components of the cash flow to equity including potential" dividends. We study publicly traded firms from five Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru during the period...

The study aims to find out whether the disappearing dividends, the decline in the number of dividend payers, the size effect and the increasing dividend/earnings concentration found in several developed and emerging markets exist among the industrials traded in the ISE. The study also analyzes...

We present univariate and multivariate evidence to show that firms which engage in initial stock repurchases have some specific economic and financial attributes when compared to size-and industry-matched firms. We find that initial repurchase firms are younger, have lower leverage and operating...

In this paper, we study the timing of initial stock repurchases for a sample of firms from their IPO onwards, using panel adjusted logistic regressions and hazard models to examine which variables may predict and theoretical hypotheses may explain these transactions. First, we find that initial...