Abstract:We examine how corporate payout policy is affected by managerial stock incentives using data on more than 1100 nonfinancial firms during 1993-97. We find that management share ownership encourages higher payouts by firms with potentially the greatest agency problems-those with low market-to-book ratios and low management stock ownership. We also find that management stock options change the composition of payouts. We find a strong negative relationship between dividends and management stock options, as predicted by Lambert, Lannen, and Larcker (1989), and a positive relationship between repurchases and management stock options. Our results suggest that the growth in stock options may help to explain the rise in repurchases at the expense of dividends. * Earlier versions of this paper were titled "Good News and Bad News About Share Repurchases." The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Board. We thank Stewart Myers, Manju Puri, and especially an anonymous referee for helpful comments, and Kyle Nagel, Mike Pizzi, Melissa Post, and Wendy Huang for outstanding research assistance.Among these are Berger, Ofek, and Yermack (1997) which examines how CEO stock and stock 1 options influence the choice of leverage, Denis, Denis, and Sarin (1997) which examines how insider stock ownership affects corporate diversification, and Mehran, Nogler, and Schwartz (1998) which examines how CEO share ownership and stock options influence voluntary liquidation decisions.

This paper documents “runs” on asset‐backed commercial paper (ABCP) programs in 2007. We find that one‐third of programs experienced a run within weeks of the onset of the ABCP crisis and that runs, as well as yields and maturities for new issues, were related to program‐level and macro‐financial risks. These findings are consistent with the asymmetric information framework used to explain banking panics, have implications for commercial paper investors’ degree of risk intolerance, and inform empirical predictions of recent papers on dynamic coordination failures.

We test whether executive stock ownership affects firm payouts using the 2003 dividend tax cut to identify an exogenous change in the after-tax value of dividends. We find that executives with higher ownership were more likely to increase dividends after the tax cut in 2003, whereas no relation is found in periods when the dividend tax rate was higher. Relative to previous years, firms that initiated dividends in 2003 were more likely to reduce repurchases. The stock price reaction to the tax cut suggests that the substitution of dividends for repurchases may have been anticipated, consistent with agency conflicts. Copyright 2007 by The American Finance Association.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractIn the conduct of monetary policy, there exists a risk-return trade-off between financial conditions and financial stability, which complements monetary policy's traditional trade-off between inflation and real activity. The trade-off exists even if monetary policy does not target financial stability considerations independently of its inflation and real activity goals, because risks to future financial stability are increased by the buildup of financial vulnerabilities from persistent accommodative monetary policy when the economy is close to potential. We review monetary policy transmission channels and financial frictions that give rise to this trade-off between financial conditions and financial stability, within a monitoring program across asset markets, banking firms, shadow banking, and the nonfinancial sector. We focus on vulnerabilities that affect monetary policy's risk-return trade-off, including 1) pricing of risk, 2) leverage, 3) maturity and liquidity mismatch, and 4) interconnectedness and complexity. We also discuss the extent to which structural and time-varying macroprudential policies can counteract the buildup of vulnerabilities, thus mitigating monetary policy's risk-return trade-off.