Dividend Payouts and Information Shocks

We examine changes in firms’ dividend payouts following an exogenous shock to the information asymmetry problem between managers and investors. Agency theories predict a decrease in dividend payments to the extent that improved public information lowers managers’ need to convey their commitment to avoid overinvestment via costly dividend payouts. Conversely, dividends could increase if minority investors are in a better position to extract cash dividends. We test these predictions by analyzing the dividend payment behavior of a global sample of firms around the mandatory adoption of IFRS and the initial enforcement of new insider trading laws. Both events serve as proxies for a general improvement of the information environment and, hence, the corporate governance structure in the economy. We find that, following the two events, firms are less likely to pay (increase) dividends, but more likely to cut (stop) such payments. The changes occur around the time of the informational shock, and only in countries and for firms subject to the regulatory change. They are more pronounced when the inherent agency issues or the informational shocks are stronger. We further find that the information content of dividends decreases after the events. The results highlight the importance of the agency costs of free cash flows (and changes therein) for shaping firms’ payout policies.     

Executive stock-based compensation and firms’ cash payout: the role of shareholders’ tax-related payout preferences

We hypothesize that the structure of executive stock-based compensation helps to align managers’ payout choices with shareholders’ tax-related payout preferences. Specifically, stock options, which are not dividend-protected, can deter self-interested executives from using dividends as a form of payout. In contrast, restricted stock, which is dividend-protected, is more likely to induce the use of dividends. Relatedly, shareholders’ preferences for dividends, which are taxed as ordinary income, can depend on the income tax consequences of dividends relative to those of long-term capital gains. To test our hypothesis, we investigate whether the exogenous changes in shareholders’ tax-related payout preferences following the 2003 dividend tax rate reduction result in predictable shifts in executive stock-based compensation and in managers’ payout choices. Consistent with our prediction, we find a positive relation between the increased use of dividends in firms’ payouts and the increased (decreased) use of restricted stock (stock options) in executive compensation, particularly for firms with a greater percentage ownership by individual investors and with lower costs associated with modifying the structure of their compensation plans. Our investigation of the role of shareholders’ tax-related payout preferences in the design of executive stock-based compensation extends the prior literature that has largely focused on the role of incentive contracts in inducing managerial effort, risk taking, and retention.     

Efficiently Inefficient Markets for Assets and Asset Management

We consider a model where investors can invest directly or search for an asset manager, information about assets is costly, and managers charge an endogenous fee. The efficiency of asset prices is linked to the efficiency of the asset management market: if investors can find managers more easily, more money is allocated to active management, fees are lower, and asset prices are more efficient. Informed managers outperform after fees, uninformed managers underperform, while the average manager's performance depends on the number of “noise allocators.” Small investors should remain uninformed, but large and sophisticated investors benefit from searching for informed active managers since their search cost is low relative to capital. Hence, managers with larger and more sophisticated investors are expected to outperform.     

Corporate governance,life cycle,and payout precommitment: An emerging market study

We analyze the role of firm‐level corporate governance in determining the precommitment payout policy of emerging market firms and investigate whether there is a precommitment life‐cycle effect. Unlike previous studies of U.S. firms, we find evidence of precommitment only among relatively well‐governed firms, which combine good governance with large dividend payouts to shareholders and large debt‐related repayments to creditors. We also document a strong precommitment life‐cycle effect. Firms in the growth and mature stages of their life cycle tend to use both debt and dividends to precommit to investors, with an increasing proportion of dividends in total payout measures. Our results are robust to an array of control variables, alternate payout proxies, market setting, and firm‐level corporate governance, and it addresses potential endogeneity concerns in the sample.     

Asymmetric Information,Managerial Opportunism,Financing, and Payout Policies

We examine corporate issuance and payout policies in the presence of both adverse selection (in capital markets) and managerial opportunism. Our results establish the importance of the locus of decision control in the firm. When shareholders determine policies, debt financing is always optimal in the presence of either adverse selection or managerial opportunism. However, when both of these problems are simultaneously present, equity issuance can become an optimal signaling mechanism. Shareholders' most preferred signaling mechanism is restricting dividends, followed by equity financing, and finally underpricing securities. When managers determine policies, a reversed hierarchy may be obtained.     

Board independence,internal information environment and voluntary disclosure of auditors’ reports on internal controls

When there is high information asymmetry between directors and managers, independent directors do not have enough information to perform their functions. Only when faced with a good internal information environment can such directors acquire enough information to provide advice and monitor managers, and only under these conditions can increasing their proportion on the board effectively reduce agency problems, such as driving managers to disclose information to investors. Using a sample of Chinese listed firms that voluntarily disclose their auditors’ reports on internal controls from 2007 to 2009, this study explores how the information acquisition costs of independent directors affect their monitoring effectiveness by investigating the disclosure decisions of their internal control audits. We find that when the information asymmetry between insiders and outside directors is low and the proportion of independent directors on a board is high, a firm is more likely to voluntarily disclose its internal control audit report.     

Institutional tax clienteles and payout policy

This paper employs heterogeneity in institutional shareholder tax characteristics to identify the relation between firm payout policy and tax incentives. Analysis of a panel of firms matched with the tax characteristics of the clients of their institutional shareholders indicates that “dividend-averse” institutions are significantly less likely to hold shares in firms with larger dividend payouts. This relation between the tax preferences of institutional shareholders and firm payout policy may reflect dividend-averse institutions gravitating towards low dividend paying firms or managers adapting their payout policies to the interests of their institutional shareholders. Evidence is provided that both effects are operative. Plausibly exogenous changes in payout policy result in shifting institutional ownership patterns. Similarly, exogenous changes in the tax cost of institutional investors receiving dividends results in changes in firm dividend policy.     

Security Design with Investor Private Information

I study the security design problem of a firm when investors rather than managers have private information about the firm. I find that it is often optimal to issue information‐sensitive securities such as equity. The “folklore proposition of debt” from traditional signaling models only goes through if the firm can vary the face value of debt with investor demand. When the firm has several assets, debt backed by a pool of assets is optimal when the degree of competition among investors is low, while equity backed by individual assets is optimal when competition is high.     

Directional Preferences, Information Processing, and Investors' Forecasts of Earnings

This paper investigates the effects of preferences on judgments in an investing context, where investors should be motivated to interpret information objectively, yet have clear preferences with respect to what the information they are evaluating conveys (i.e., a gain or a loss on their investment). The results of the experiment are consistent with theories of motivated reasoning that predict when and in what manner directional preferences affect how information is processed. Specifically, investors are motivated to agree unthinkingly with information that suggests they might make money on their investment, but disagree with information that suggests they might lose money. In disagreeing, long investors expect earnings to be relatively high and short investors expect earnings to be relatively low. These results have implications not only for understanding investor behavior, but also for understanding the biased behavior of market participants who face conflicts of interest, such as analysts, managers, and auditors, by providing direct evidence that such behavior can arise for purely psychological reasons.     

Payout Policy Relevance and Accounting‐based Valuation

DeAngelo and DeAngelo (2006) (D&D) argue ‘payout policy is not irrelevant and investment is not the sole determinant of value, even in frictionless markets’. Consistent with this view, we argue that the concept of a perfect capital market in Miller and Modigliani (1961) (M&M) and Fama and Miller (1972) can be extended to allow for managerial moral hazard if managers are assumed not to participate in securities trading. An updated version of the M&M valuation model is presented and the possibility of managerial free cash flow (FCF) retention through operating expense manipulation and sub‐optimal investment policies is discussed. Our analysis supports D&D's argument that payout policy is relevant and indicates that value relevance of payout depends on the quality of earnings measurement and the optimality of investment policy. Following this, we develop a framework for analyzing valuation and informational roles of payout in accounting‐based valuation models and apply this framework to the Ohlson (1995) and Feltham and Ohlson (1996) models. This analysis shows how these models permit payout valuation relevance due to managerial FCF retention but not payout informational relevance. Finally, we consider how the Feltham and Ohlson (1996) model can be extended to incorporate time variation in expected profitability of capital investment caused by time variation in managerial FCF retention activities and show that this explicitly affects payout value relevance. We conclude that the development of models where payout plays an explicit valuation role due to issues of moral hazard is an important direction for future research.     

Taste,information, and asset prices: implications for the valuation of CSR

Firms often undertake activities that do not necessarily increase cash flows (e.g., costly investments in corporate social responsibility or CSR), and some investors value these non cash activities (i.e., they have a “taste” for these activities). We develop a model to capture this phenomenon and focus on the asset-pricing implications of differences in investors’ tastes for firms’ activities and outputs. Our model shows that, first, investor taste differences provide a basis for investor clientele effects that are endogenously determined by the shares demanded by different types of investors. Second, because the market must clear at one price, investors’ demands are influenced by all dimensions of firm output even if their preferences are only over some dimensions. Third, information releases cause trading volume, even when all investors have the same information. Fourth, investor taste provides a rationale for corporate spin-offs that help firms better target their shareholder bases. Finally, individual social responsibility can lead to corporate social responsibility when managers care about stock price because price reacts to investments in CSR activities.     

Reputation stretching in mutual fund starts

This study examines the role of reputation stretching in the context of mutual funds. We show that the reputation stretching strategy increases net fund inflows to new funds run by well-performing fund managers and yields a net increase of fund inflows to fund families. Reputable fund managers exhibit one-year performance persistence for managing new funds, which can help investors assess managers when selecting funds. We also find that the decrease in information asymmetry associated with managerial reputation benefits investors by leading to an increase in new fund returns in the short run, compared to those of new funds run by managers without track records. Overall, the reputation stretching strategy benefits both investors, by reducing information asymmetry and improving investment returns, and fund families, by increasing net fund inflows to new equity funds.     

Financial reporting quality and dividend policy: New evidence from an international level

This study examines the link between financial reporting quality and dividend payout across 76 countries. We find that financial reporting quality increases dividend payout after controlling for firm and country specifics. We also investigate different channels that moderate the relation between financial reporting quality and dividend payout. We find that the positive association between high-quality financial reporting and dividend payout is more pronounced when firms have free cash flow problems, face severe information asymmetry, and are located in countries with weaker minority shareholder protection rights. Interestingly, we find evidence that high reporting quality enhances firms' payment of dividend even when these firms already overpaying their shareholders. However, the relation becomes weaker when firms overpass the optimal level of dividend payout. The findings remain consistent after several robustness checks, thus highlighting the effectiveness of more transparent disclosure of financial information in reducing information asymmetry related to firms' internal agency costs and their relationships with external parties.     

Limitation of Liability and the Ownership Structure of the Firm

This paper models the optimal choice of shareholder liability. If investors want managers to be monitored, the monitors should be residual claimants (shareholders), and monitoring and firm value will increase as shareholders commit more of their wealth to the firm. When liquidating wealth is costly, contingent liability dominates direct investment as a wealth commitment device; however, if wealth is unobservable, under this regime only relatively poor investors will hold shares in equilibrium. This may be prevented at a cost by verifying shareholder wealth and restricting stock transfers. Comparative statics on various liability regimes are used to motivate actual contractual arrangements.     

Carrot and stick: A role for benchmark-adjusted compensation in active fund management

Investors delegating their wealth to privately informed managers face not only an intrinsic asymmetric information problem but also a potential misalignment in risk preferences. In this setting, we show that by tying fees symmetrically to the appropriate benchmark investors can tilt a fund portfolio toward their optimal risk exposure and realize nearly all the value of managers’ information. They attain these benefits despite an inherent inefficiency in the choice of the benchmark, and at no extra cost of compensating managers for exposure to relative-performance risk. Under certain conditions, benchmark-adjusted performance fees are necessary to prevent passive alternatives from dominating active management. Our results shed light on a recent debate on the appropriate fee structure of active funds in contexts of high competition from passive funds.     

Safe but fragile: Information acquisition,liquidity support and redemption runs

This paper proposes a theory of redemption runs based on strategic information acquisition by fund managers. We argue that liquidity lines provided by third parties can be a source of financial fragility, as they incentivize fund managers to acquire private information about the value of their assets. This strategic information acquisition can lead to inefficient market liquidity dry-ups caused by self-fulfilling fears of adverse selection. By lowering asset prices, information acquisition also reduces the value of funds’ assets-under-management and may spur inefficient redemption runs by investors. Two different regimes can arise: one in which funds’ information acquisition incentives are unaffected by the volume of redemptions, and another where market and funding liquidity risk mutually reinforce each other.     

Sequential Learning,Predictability, and Optimal Portfolio Returns

This paper finds statistically and economically significant out‐of‐sample portfolio benefits for an investor who uses models of return predictability when forming optimal portfolios. Investors must account for estimation risk, and incorporate an ensemble of important features, including time‐varying volatility, and time‐varying expected returns driven by payout yield measures that include share repurchase and issuance. Prior research documents a lack of benefits to return predictability, and our results suggest that this is largely due to omitting time‐varying volatility and estimation risk. We also document the sequential process of investors learning about parameters, state variables, and models as new data arrive.     

信息互动、投资决策与股票价格——基于机构投资者信息网络的分析

机构投资者之间存在着广泛的信息互动,其中包括信息共享与社会学习。本文基于2005-2018年我国A股市场与公募证券投资基金市场数据,应用社会关系网络理论实证分析了信息互动对于基金持仓决策以及股票市场价格的影响。结果表明:(1)信息互动对于基金持仓决策具有显著影响,且在不同决策情景与市场行情下其影响具有差异;(2)基金信息互动的影响可以分为“同城效应”和“异地效应”,不同城市的两种效应存在显著差异,并且不同城市基金的市场影响力也有所不同;(3)基金信息互动通过提高市场定价效率对于股价长期特质波动具有降低作用。本文基于社会关系网络理论分析了私有信息在机构投资者之间传播产生的影响,为认识机构投资者决策行为与股票市场价格异象提供了新的维度。     

How Control System Design Influences Performance Misreporting

This paper investigates reporting honesty when managers have monetary incentives to overstate their performance. We argue that managers who report about their performance will take into account how their report affects their peers (i.e., other managers at the same hierarchical level). This effect depends on the design of the organization's control system, in particular, on the reward structure and the information policy regarding individual performance reports. The reward structure determines if peers’ monetary payoff is increased or decreased when managers claim a higher level of performance. The information policy determines if managers will be able to link individual peers to their reports and affects the nonmonetary costs of breaking social norms. We present the results of a laboratory experiment. As predicted, we find that participants are more likely to overstate their performance if this increases the monetary payoff of others than if their reported performance decreases others’ monetary gains. In addition, overstatements are lower under an open information policy, where each individual's reported performance is made public, compared to a closed information policy, where participants only learn the average performance of the other participants. Our findings have several important implications for management accounting research and practice.     

Accounting information,disclosure, and expected utility: Do investors really abhor uncertainty?

Investors are said to “abhor uncertainty,” but if there were no uncertainty they could earn only the risk‐free rate. A fundamental result in the analytical accounting literature shows that investors buying into a CARA‐normal CAPM market pay lower asset prices, gain higher ex‐ante expected returns, and obtain higher expected utility, when the market payoff has higher variance. New investors obtain similar “welfare” gains from risk under a log/power utility CAPM. These results do not imply that investors “abhor information.” To realize investors' ex‐ante expectations, the subjective probability distributions representing market expectations must be accurate. Greater payoff risk can add to investors' expected utility, but higher ex‐post(realized) utility comes from better information and more accurate ex‐ante expectations. An important implication for accounting is that greater disclosure can have the simultaneous effects of (i) exposing more fully or perceptibly firms' payoff uncertainty, thereby increasing new investors' expected utility, and (ii) improving market estimates of firms' payoff parameters (means, variances, covariances), thereby giving investors a better chance of realizing their expectations. Paradoxically, better information can be valuable to new investors by exposing more fully and more accurately the risk in firms' business operations and results–new investors maximizing expected utility want both more risk and better information.