The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), like many other development agencies and donors, increasingly emphasizes evidence-based programming. This requires assessments of project performance at all stages of implementation, comprising ex-ante impact assessment, monitoring...

We investigate whether dividends convey information about the risk of a company by examining the reaction of implied volatility in the option market to the announcement of a dividend initiation. Implied volatility decreases after the announcement and the magnitude of the decline in volatility is...