Movements in the value of corporate assets are justified by changes in expected future cash flow. The appropriate measure of cash flow for valuing assets is net payout, which is the sum of dividends, interest, and net repurchases of equity and debt. When discount rates are low and equity...

This study's underlying premise is that current pension plan accounting has two important negative effects. First, it distorts the measurement of earnings and net worth in the short run, as well as the pattern of earnings over future periods. Second, this distortion can send incorrect signals to...

Using data from bank holding company regulatory reports, we examine the relationshipbetween stock repurchases and financial performance for a large sample of bank holding companies over the years 1987 to 1998. The primary result is that higher levels of repurchases in one year are associated...

Banks face two different kinds of moral hazard problems: asset substitution by shareholders (e.g., making risky, negative net present value loans) and managerial rent seeking (e.g., investing in inefficient 'pet' projects and consuming perquisites that yield private benefits). The privately...

This paper examines the reaction of the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE) to dividend announcements by a sample of firms listed at the FTSE/ATHEX 20 and FTSE/ATHEX Mid 40 for a fixed period 2004-2008. It also provides analytical information about the Greek Stock Market and the regulations underlying...

Share repurchase happens when a company repurchases its own shares for any purpose determined by the general meeting of shareholders, including their further sale. Share repurchase is like dividend payout a form of transferring profit to shareholders. However, contrary to dividends, it is quite...

This paper reconsiders the issue of share price reactions to dividend announcements. Previous papers rely almost exclusively on a naive dividend model in which the dividend change is used as a proxy for the dividend surprise. We use the difference between the actual dividend and the analyst...

This paper studies the impact of the concentration of control, the type of controlling shareholder and the dividend tax preference of the controlling shareholder on dividend policy for a panel of 220 German firms over 1984-2005. While the concentration of control does not have an effect on the...

We analyze how the introduction of repurchases in 1998, and a major tax reform in 2001, affected the payout policy of German firms. To this end, we estimate Lintner (1956) partial adjustment models for both dividends and total payouts. We also analyze the implications for payout of changes in...

Distorted performance measures in compensation contracts elicit suboptimal behavioral responses that may even prove to be dysfunctional (gaming). This paper applies the empirical test developed by Courty and Marschke (2008) to detect whether the widely used class of Residual Income based...