Due to its distinctive institutional background, Oman offers a valuable opportunity to investigate the stability of the dividend policy. In Oman, (1) there are no taxes on dividends, (2) firms are highly levered mainly through bank loans, (3) there is a high concentration of stock ownership and...

We investigate capital structure dynamics in a unique financing environment where (1) we avoid the complex tax environments faced by previous studies and where (2) firms rely primarily on bank loans rather than the public debt market. Consistent with recent empirical evidence, we find that stock...

The volatility processes of the S&P 100 index and all its constituent stocks are compared after estimating ARCH models from ten years of daily returns, from 1983 to 1992. The leverage effect of Black (1976) is estimated from an extension of the asymmetric volatility model of Glosten et al....