Despite a documented decline in the number of dividend payers in the UK it is found that aggregate real dividends paid by industrials actually increased between 1979 and 2000. This was attributed to the firms lost from the sample being generally small distributors of dividends whilst the growth...

This paper investigates the dividend decisions of firms in the UK reporting losses after sustained periods of profitability. It is found that loss-making firms are more likely to reduce dividends compared to firms that remain profitable, although a loss is far from a guarantee that the dividend...

This paper presents and implements a number of tests for non-linear dependence and a test for chaos using transactions prices on three LIFFE futures contracts: the Short Sterling interest rate contract, the Long Gilt government bond contract, and the FTSE 100 stock index futures contract. While...

The extent of non-trading is shown to be much greater in the UK than in the more heavily researched US equity markets. Over the period 1975 to 1995 we find that almost 44% of all stocks in our sample failed to trade on the last day of a given month, a figure which is significantly higher than...

The UK stockmarket is tested for mean variance efficiency (MVE) in the sense that sectoral stock returns satisfy the restrictions implied by CAPM. There are two main innovations in the paper. One is the use of a model for excess returns in which the conditional covariance matrix of returns...

Purpose: A growing strand of literature has focused on the returns performance of zero dividend stocks. This paper seeks to provide new evidence on the link between dividend payment and returns history and firms’ subsequent stock market performance.Design/methodology/approach: Prior research...

Trading volume and order flow have both been closely associated with informed trader activity in the market microstructure literature. Using theory that explains regular intraday patterns in trading data, we transform these two variables into proxies for private information and examine their...

From Prof Steve Thomas and Mr Richard A. Werner.Sir, Mervyn King deserves praise for recognising that things could turn ugly when the housing bubble bursts ("King links rises in rates to fears on house prices", July 1). But is his recommended plan of action suitable - namely to raise interest...

This paper examines several problems involved in modelling the structure of consumer behaviour. A new model of consumer demand is presented which encompasses the indirect translog, the CES and the LES as special cases, enabling nested comparisons to be made. Within this framework we show that...

Relatively there is little empirical research that has been taken to understand how the underlying economy affects customers’ subsequent financial product purchase behaviours. A better understanding of this influence and being able to predict the probability of purchasing are important for...