Since the 1960s, there is an ongoing debate on dividend policy, which remains a controversial issue to this day. Why do firms pay dividends? For decades, the academics have not been able to agree on any convincing explanation, and the same time, many even claim that firms should not pay...

The dividend irrelevancy proposition, which states that dividends have no impact on the market value of the firm, is only valid under the hypothesis of perfect markets. If market imperfections are considered, namely, the existence of taxes, then dividend distributions became relevant for the...

This paper analyses the technical efficiency of Chinese fossil-fuel electricity generation companies from 1999 to 2011, using a Bayesian stochastic frontier model. The results reveal that efficiency varies among the fossil-fuel electricity generation companies that were analysed. We also focus...

Interbank money markets play a fundamental role in financial systems but they can also be a channel through which problems in one institution can spread to the remaining ones. In particular, the potential for contagion stemming from interbank money markets is closely related with the pattern of...

This paper estimates changes in total productivity, breaking this down into technically efficient change and technological change by means of data envelopment analysis applied to a representative sample of insurance companies operating in the Portuguese market. The aim of this procedure is to...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the stock price adjustment after a dividend distribution, allowing for different types of investors and market imperfections, including taxes and transaction costs. Design/methodology/approach – An arbitrage model is developed to determine...

This article reports the results of tests on the weak-form market efficiency applied to the PSI-20 index prices of the Lisbon stock market from January 1993 to December 2006. As an emerging stock market, it is unlikely that it is fully information-efficient, but we show that the level of...

Acquisition announcements influence the stock price of target firms, providing an opportunity for insiders to obtain significant abnormal returns. We study the presence of positive abnormal returns before the announcement date, in target firms, quoted in Euronext markets (Belgium, France, The...

This article analyses the determinants of banks' profitability in the Portuguese banking sector during the period 1990 to 2005. The study extends the established literature on modelling the banks'k performance by applying a Fourier approximation in order to detect for possible nonlinearities...