This paper documents a relation between the shareholder base and payout policy. Consistentwith the idea that the shareholder base is related to the cost of external financing we find thatfirms with small shareholder bases have lower payout levels and maintain higher cash holdingsthan firms with...

We want to assess the relationship between the equity and the debt cost of capital. Using a verysimple dividend discount model we compute the implied discount rate and we compare it with thecorresponding premium on the corporate credit default swap using a cointegration approach. Wedemonstrated...

This is the first study to show evidence of liquidity risk in private equity returns.Our data contains cash flows for 4,403 liquidated investments, which are both successfuland unsuccessful, reducing sample selection bias to a minimum. We find that a onestandarddeviation positive shock in...

When should shareholders afford a manager the discretion to be opportunistic and when should they constrain him to be principled? We show that discretion is associated with lower powered incentives than is constraint: opportunism may put shareholder capital at risk; shareholder can lessen that...

The public and private sector costs of capital differ in the presence of taxes, because taxes are a cost to the private but not the public sector. We use a quasi-arbitrage approach to show how to include taxes in a comparison of capital costs. We find that taxes induce distortions that generate...