High levels of investment in relation to cash flows, combined with high dividend payouts, have caused UK water companies persistently to borrow to meet their cash outflows. This behaviour is not adequately explained by mainstream theories of dividends. The intensive regulatory environment has...

We study payout by U.K. listed companies during 1993-2018. Regular dividends remain the dominant channel, but flexible payouts (special dividends and repurchases) have grown, and they make total payout more responsive to earnings. Flexible payouts are used to augment regular dividends: few...

We compare the importance of opportunities for market timing with incentives to manage EPS, in decisions to repurchase. We distinguish between repurchases which are done to distribute cash (payout-related) and those which are conducted to provide shares for re-issue to staff (pay-related). Firms...

This paper determines the market value of dividends in the UK during periods before and after 1997. Previous studies, which use the ex-dividend day method, tend to provide noisy and potentially biased measures of dividend value. We estimate the value of dividends from the prices of shares that...