Given restrictions placed on communication with prospective investors, retail investor attention can help firms/underwriters with the task of initially valuing an IPO. Using Google search volume to proxy for retail investor attention, we find that the presence of and an increase in retail...

We investigate how private information in stock prices impacts quarterly dividend changes. We find that the positive relationship between past returns and current dividend changes strengthens when returns convey more private information. This finding is robust to the use of several price...

Acquisition announcements cause upward revisions in the market value of target firms' technology peers, whether targets and their peers belong to the same industry or not. Firms having deeper technology overlaps with the targets experience more dramatic price revisions. Consistent with the...

We use the staggered adoption of Wrongful Discharge Laws (WDLs) by U.S. state courts as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the causal impact of firing costs and employment protection on corporate payouts. We find that the greater employment protection imposed by WDLs leads to higher share...

We investigate how corporate payout policy is influenced by executive incentives, i.e. stock and option holdings, stock options delta, and stock-based pay-performance sensitivity for 1,650 publicly listed firms from the UK, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain, over the period from...