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...

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 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 examine how firms respond to uncertainty around U.S. tax policy changes, namely the individual level tax rate increases set to take effect on January 1, 2011 and January 1, 2013. We provide evidence that firms time the uncertainty in the tax environment and revise their dividend policy to an...

Overconfidence and overextrapolation are two behavioral biases that are pervasive in human thinking. A long line of research documents that such biases influence business decisions by distorting managers' expected productivity. We propose a new mechanism in which the biases change firms'...

Topics on behavioral corporate finance are concerned with the consequences ofboundedly rational investors for optimal financial decisions by firm management. Aspects ofbounded rationality are relevant both for the theory and the practice of corporate finance. Onthe one hand, a new kind of...

We apply cumulative prospect theory and hedonic framing to evaluate discountreverse convertibles (DRCs) and reverse convertible bonds (RCBs) as important examples ofstructured products from a boundedly rational investor’s point of view. While commonexpected utility theory would also conclude...

We examine a certain class of new financial instruments which are designed aslotteries on the outcome of prominent sports events like the Soccer World Cup 2006. We areable to explain why there might be a positive demand for such sports-related financialinstruments even if we take riskless...

This study investigates the relationship between institutional ownership and dividend payout behavior of the firm in Germany. Using a propensity scoring method estimator to control for endogeneity problems, we find evidence that neither institutional ownership nor bank control is statistically...

Die Finanztheorie betrachtet in den letzten Jahren verstärkt die Bedeutung institutionellerRahmenbedingungen bei der Gestaltung von Finanzierungsverträgen in verschiedenenLändern. In diesem Kontext vergleicht das vorliegende Papier unterschiedliche, für denangelsächsischen und deutschen...