We investigate firms' decisions to pay elective stock dividends, known in the UK as scrip dividends. Scrip dividends give investors the choice between receiving new shares or the equivalent value as a cash dividend. UK firms paying scrip dividends are more likely to be financially constrained,...

We investigate firms' decisions to pay elective stock dividends, known in the UK as scrip dividends. Scrip dividends give investors the choice between receiving new shares or the equivalent value as a cash dividend. UK firms paying scrip dividends are more likely to be financially constrained,...

We examine the capital market consequences of a regulatory intervention aimed at generalizing tenure voting in French public companies. The 2014 Florange Act departs from the ‘one share one vote' principle by automatically granting double voting rights (DVR) to shares held for at least two...

Dell Technologies Inc. (“Dell”) is planning a “backdoor-IPO” transaction that would bring it back to the public market with a multiclass structure. Dell's return to the public market is expected to make it one of the ten largest multiclass companies with an aggregate capitalization...

We examine the role of IPOs as a source of financing by comparing firms from countries with different degrees of stock market development. Focusing on acquisition investments, our results suggest that firms operating in economies with a more developed stock market extract more benefits from the...

Random walk theory explains the concept of efficient markets. The markets are described as efficient because they impound information whether private or public very quickly and reflect it in the prices of stocks traded. Investors therefore cannot outperform the markets based on the information...

Using a novel text-based measure of top management team diversity, covering over 70,000 top executives in over 6,500 U.S. firms from 1999 to 2014, we show that analyst forecasts are systematically more pessimistic for firms with more diverse top management teams ("diverse firms"), especially for...

This paper offers in-depth analysis of the determinants and features of voluntary disclosure based on information in the annual reports of 1066 Chinese firms listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges. This extensive sample represents about 80% of all public companies in China. Our...

In recent years, stock pledge financing has prevailed in China. Individual shareholders’ stock-pledge announcements often release a signal for financing, thus causing abnormal stock-price fluctuations. Our paper focuses on the pledges by individual controlling shareholders between 2006 and...

Using an international sample of IPO firms from 36 countries and a country-level index for societal trust, we find strong evidence that societal trust is negatively associated with the degree of IPO underpricing. In cross-sectional analyses, we find that the effect of societal trust in reducing...