Signaling with dividends and share repurchases: a choice between deterministic and stochastic cash disbursements

We study firms signaling with cash disbursements and show thatthe choice of a deterministic or a stochastic disbursement dependson a property of the firm's production function that is analogousto absolute risk aversion for a utility function. With decreasing(increasing) absolute risk aversion, the high-quality firm prefersto distinguish itself from the low-quality firm with a stochastic(deterministic) outlay. We then study in detail two common formsof corporate cash distributions: dividends, a deterministicdisbursement, and share repurchases, a stochastic disbursement.