This paper measures corporate control benefits - the value that dominant vote-holders expropriate from a controlled company to the detriment of other shareholders. Control benefits are extracted from the total value of the votes in the control block, based on a baseline control contest model in...

Studies of share repurchases, or share buy-backs as they are referred to in Australia, have been an important part of financial research. In addition, there is increasing interest in the relationship between legal regulation and finance. In this Research Report, we combine these areas of...

In this paper, we examine how stock option usage affects total corporate payout. Using fixed-effects panel data estimators on various samples of Execucomp firms from 1993 to 2005, we find the higher the executive stock options, the lower the total payout, ceteris paribus. We also find some...

The case of Evergreen Solar (ESLR) suggests counterparty risk exposure be added to the litany of misgivings on the economic efficiency, absolute performance, and governance conflicts of ASRs. Evergreen Solar in July 2008 issues a convertible, enters into an offsetting, broker-backed long...

The current study adds consideration of a $1.7 billion accelerated stock repurchase (ASR) by Hewlett-Packard (HP) to a recent analysis of 2006-2007 ASRs by Applied Materials, Cypress Semiconductor, Linear Technology, and Xilinx. The HP addition to company case studies leaves fundamental findings...

A previous study failed to identify economic benefits to explain the 2006-2007 popularity of accelerated stock repurchase programs (ASRs) funded through issuance of convertible debt. The case study of a $600 million transaction by Cypress Semiconductor did find cosmetic advantages in terms of...

This paper reexamines MM's dividend and capital structure irrelevance theorems, refuting the first and confirming the latter from the inside out framework. The paper cooperates with Garry and Linda DeAngelo's papers on the irrelevance of the MM's dividend irrelevance theorem and refutes...

Antigravity introduces a transaction so implausibly attractive it would be deemed impossible were it not that U.S. companies already float an inferior equivalent at a rate of nearly $500 billion per year. A Cashless Buyback(tm) is exactly like a cash buyback minus the risk and should be viewed...

We examine how firms structure payout and debt commitments to address governance weaknesses. Firms with severe agency conflicts precommit through a combination of dividends and debt or through dividends rather than debt alone. Such firms also shift their shareholder payouts towards regular...

Both market timing and investment-based theories of corporate financing predict underperformance after firms raise capital, but only market timing predicts that the composition of financing (equity compared to debt) should also forecast returns. In cross-sectional tests, we find that the amount...