Dividends are clustered in increments of 5, such as 25, 50, and 75. Firms that gravitate towards these ‘prominent’ amounts have lower operating performance and lower annual five-factor alphas of 77 b.p. Consistent with agency frictions that lead to lazy decisions, clustering effects are stronger for entrenched firms, with more market power, and less shareholder activism. Dividend increases also cluster more than cuts, consistent with saliency bias. In a counterfactual exercise, we find no similar patterns in a sample of ADRs. Our results complement a number of recent studies showing the economic importance of simple decision heuristics.

We examine the effect of internal employee coordination on customer trust, focusing specifically on employees’ responsiveness to each other as an important, quantifiable, and objective aspect of internal coordination. Using proprietary data from a company with exogenous assignment of employees to teams that serve individual customers, we study how inter‐employee responsiveness influences customer trust. Each customer is served via an app‐based group chat by a randomly assigned team of employees. Our data include more than 2 million group chat messages with over 16 thousand customers. We find that inter‐employee responsiveness serves as a credible signal that helps build customer trust, as evidenced by their subsequent contracting choices. The effect is more pronounced when the signal is (1) more frequent and (2) more intense. Our findings highlight the novel value of internal employee responsiveness as a credible signal that helps build trust with external stakeholders.

We study the impact of bank board structure as a signaling mechanism in loan syndication. We find that the quality of the lead arranger’s board, and specifically the monitoring quality of the board, has a positive effect on the ability to syndicate a loan. The impact of board quality is separate and distinct from lead arranger reputation. Board monitoring quality plays a more important role when the borrower and lead arranger have no prior relationship, after the bankruptcy of an existing borrower, and during the financial crisis. We posit that one channel for our findings is through board oversight of the CEO, and we provide evidence that CEO quality partially mediates the relationship between board quality and loan syndication. Overall, we conclude the quality of the lead arranger’s board, as a separate and distinct effect to reputation, serves as a credible signal to participant banks, mitigating moral hazard and adverse selection concerns.