We study the issuance and payout policies that maximize the value of a firm facing both agency costs of free cash-flow and external financing costs. We find that the firm optimally issues equity. Equity distributes no dividends until a target cash level is reached, while new equity is issued...

We conduct a series of experiments that simulate trading in financial markets and which allows us to identify the different effects that subjects’ risk attitudes and belief updating rules have on the information content of the order flow. We find that there are very few risk-neutral subjects...