French law mandates that employees of publicly listed companies can elect two types of directors to represent employees. Privatized companies must reserve board seats for directors elected by employees by right of employment, while employee-shareholders can elect a director whenever they hold at...

Research on the impact of open market share repurchases has been hindered by the lack of dataavailable on actual share repurchases in many countries, including the US. Using a previouslyunused database containing detailed information on 36,848 repurchases made by 352 French firms,we show that...

An open market share buyback is not a firm commitment, and there is limited evidence on whether firms repurchase the intended shares. Unlike US studies, we use data from unique UK regulatory and disclosure environment that allows to accurately measure the share buyback completion rates. We show...

In Japan, the percentage of shareholders has increased while dividend rate has decrease. In previous years, the dividend rate is said to be lower in Japan than in USA or Europe. Dividend rates in Japanese firms could have increased as far as foreign shareholders have increased since most of them...

One of the central puzzles of signaling theory is how to assess signal quality, in particular the potential for signal mimicking. Our study provides evidence of signal mimicking in the context of stock repurchases. Employing an ex-ante proxy for the likelihood of mimicking stock repurchases and...

In this paper we develop a framework for optimal investment decisions for insurance companies in the presence of (partially) unhedgeable risk. The perspective that we choose is from an insurance company that maximises the stream of dividends paid to its shareholders. The policy instruments that...

We examine the over-investment motivation for share repurchases using a sample of 139 Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) between 1996 and 2010. By combining a REIT's property portfolio data with project ROAs from the underlying real estate market, we are able to create a unique measure of the...

Using seventeen observable demographic characteristics, we investigate the impact of six CEO profiles on dividend policy. Firms headed by married, Republican, Christian CEOs with children maintain higher dividend yields and are more likely to considerably increase their dividend payout....

We examine the payout policy of U.S. firms over the period 1980–2008. Prior research indicates that firm characteristics, managerial preferences, and investor clienteles are all important factors in setting payout policy. Counter to the oft-reported positive relation between senior citizens...

Dividend smoothing is a well-established empirical fact in developed countries. This paper investigates the dividend smoothing behavior in Korea where the tax regime and institutional settings of the financial market are different from those of developed countries. The empirical evidence shows...