Spilled Blood in the Bloodline: The Ethics of Using Genealogy to Catch Criminals

On April 24th 2018, authorities arrested 72- year-old Joseph James DeAngelo. Investigators had compelling evidence to suggest that DeAngelo committed at least 12 murders, 50 rapes, and over 100 burglaries throughout California in the 70s and 80s, earning him the monikers “The East Area Rapist” and “The Golden State Killer.” DeAngelo might have lived out his life without being caught were it not for the existence of a genealogy website

Dividend Policy, Agency Costs, and Earned Equity

Why do firms pay dividends? If they didn't their asset and capital structures would eventually become untenable as the earnings of successful firms outstrip their investment opportunities. Had they not paid dividends, the 25 largest long-standing 2002 dividend payers would have cash holdings of $1.8 trillion (51$160 billion (6% of assets), and $1.2 trillion in excess of their collective$600 billion in long-term debt. Their dividend payments prevented significant agency problems since the retention of earnings would have given managers command over an additional $1.6 trillion without access to better investment opportunities and with no additional monitoring. This logic suggests that firms with relatively high amounts of earned equity (retained earnings) are especially likely to pay dividends. Consistent with this view, the fraction of publicly traded industrial firms that pays dividends is high when the ratio of earned equity to total equity (total assets) is high, and falls with declines in this ratio, becoming near zero when a firm has little or no earned equity. We observe a highly significant relation between the decision to pay dividends and the ratio of earned equity to total equity or total assets,controlling for firm size, profitability, growth, leverage, cash balances, and dividend history. In our regressions, earned equity has an economically more important impact than does profitability or growth. Our evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that firms pay dividends to mitigate agency problems.

Fundamentals, Market Timing, and Seasoned Equity Offerings

Firms conduct SEOs to resolve a near-term liquidity squeeze, and not primarily to exploit market timing opportunities. Without the SEO proceeds, 62.6% of issuers would have insufficient cash to implement their chosen operating and non-SEO financing decisions the year after the SEO. Although the SEO decision is positively related to a firm's market-to-book (M/B) ratio and prior excess stock return and negatively related to its future excess return, these relations are economically immaterial. For example, a 150% swing in future net of market stock returns (from a 75% gain to a 75% loss over three years) increases by only 1% the probability of an SEO in the immediately prior year. Strikingly, most firms with quintessential "market timer" characteristics fail to issue stock and a non-trivial number of mature firms do issue stock, with current and former dividend payers raising more than half of all issue proceeds.

Managers’ Incentives to Manipulate Earnings in Management Buyout Contests: An Examination of How Corporate Governance and Market Mechanisms Mitigate Earnings Management

In an MBO contest, managers offer to buy the firm from public shareholders at a premium to the current market price and thus have incentives to buy the firm “cheap.” Prior studies have found evidence that managers, on average, manipulate earnings downward prior to an MBO offer in an attempt to convince shareholders that their offer is fair. We extend this finding by attempting to explain the substantial cross sectional variation in the degree of manipulation across firms reported in these earlier studies. We find that boards with more independent directors and higher levels of incentive based compensation for the CEO act to discourage such manipulation. Additionally, our results show that some shareholders, minority and preexisting large outside blockholders, appear to be misled by the manipulation. However, new blockholders that acquire large shareholdings in the year before the offer are not. We also discover that managers are more likely to revise their bid upwards when the manipulation is most severe and that these new blockholders put pressure on managers to make these revisions. Finally, we investigate whether the manipulation has an impact on the final buyout contest outcome. We find that downward manipulation does not prevent managers from retaining control of the firm; however, they pay a higher premium

Dividend Guidance to Manage Analyst Dividend Expectations

Using a sample of dividend payers from 12 European countries, we document that managers guide analyst dividend expectations to avoid reporting dividends below the consensus forecast. Specifically, we show that dividend guidance predicts (1) a substantial reduction in analyst dividend forecast optimism over the course of the fiscal year and (2) that a firm will meet or beat the consensus dividend forecast by a small margin. Managers guide analyst dividend expectations to avoid negative price reactions when reporting negative dividend surprises. Our results, which are robust to endogeneity and self-selection concerns and control for contemporaneous earnings guidance, highlight the important role dividend guidance plays in managing analyst dividend expectations

Is the Dividend Puzzle Solved?

Since the 1960’s, there is an ongoing debate on dividend policy, which remains a controversial issue to this day. Why do firms pay dividends? The academics have not been able to agree on any convincing explanation, and the same time, many even claim that firms should not pay dividends, and so we have a “dividend puzzle”. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the main findings of two more recent fields of research, and to discuss why they seem to be the most promising avenues for further research, to solve the “dividend puzzle”, and to build a complete payout policy theory. These fields are: (i) the agency theory and (ii) the lifecycle theory. Besides being very intuitive, these theories are consistent with most empirical facts on U.S. firms’ payout policy.

Profitability Of Dividend Payers

Most of the firms are looking for profits as their main objective which make them develops strategies to get the target profit. In circumstances that firms get the target profit, then normally they shall distribute the earnings as dividends to shareholders. The objective of this study is to provide an empirical finding about profitability between firms namely higher dividend payers and lower dividend payers. This study uses data of listed firms in period of 2010 to 2016 which drawn from Indonesia Stock Exchange. This study uses 146 listed firms in period of 2010 to 2016 which gives 1022 as total observe data. In term of hypothesis testing, this study uses mean difference test. This study finds that firms with higher dividends have better profitability rather than the lower which means this study accepts the hypothesis that higher dividend payers have better profitability