This study provides empirical evidence on the relationship between dividend payout ratios, executive compensation and agency costs in Italy. Corporate governance in Italy is distinguished by the fact that a large number of Italian firms are family controlled, which may theoretically reduce...

Purpose -This paper seeks to present and test a model of the association between dividend payout and executive compensation. Design/methodology/approach - The authors develop a model based on Bhattacharyya whereby managerial quality is unobservable to shareholders, and therefore first-best...

Using a theoretical extension of the Friedman and Savage (1948) utility function developed in Bhattacharyya (2003), we predict that for financial assets with negative expected returns, expected return will be a declining and convex function of skewness. Using a sample of U.S. state lottery...

Bhattacharyya (2007) develops a model in which compensation contracts motivate high-quality managers to retain and invest firm earnings, while low-quality managers are motivated to distribute income to shareholders. In equilibrium, the model shows that there is a positive (negative) relationship...