This paper re-examines the case of Citizens Utilities, a firm with one class of common stock which pays stock dividends and one which pays taxable cash dividends. John Long's (1978) study of the two shares' relative prices suggests that investors may prefer cash dividends to equal-sized stock dividends. This paper finds that the cash dividend share's ex-day price decline is less than their dividend payment. Stock dividend shares fall by nearly their full dividend. The disparity between ex-day dividend valuation and the observed prices of the two shares is inconsistent with some explanations of the demand for cash dividends.

This study examines the stock price effects of security offerings and investigates the nature of information inferred by investors from offering announcements. Changes in share price are unrelated to characteristics of offerings such as the net amount of new financing, relative offering size, and the quality rating of debt issues. The type of security is the only significant determinant of the price response. The opposite patterns of abnormal stock returns following the announcement of completed versus cancelled offerings suggest that managers issue common stock or convertible debt when in managers' view shares are overpriced.

This paper studies the price reaction of French common stocks to the recent nationalization program and estimates the value that nationalized firms would have had if the nationalization program had not occurred. It finds that expropriated holders of the nationalized portfolio received a government-legislated takeover premium of about 20 percent. Premiums received for individual firms ranged from —3 to 44 percent. Industrial firm shareholders benefited most from the program. The conditions surrounding the premium dispersion raise questions about equal treatment among expropriated shareholders.

This paper analyzes how access to deposit insurance affects the common stock returns of financial institutions during periods of financial distress. During periods of distress the definition of insolvency used by insuring agencies may be modified to avoid a substantial number of bank failures. These modifications can increase the value of future deposit guarantees and affect the behavior of stock returns of banks and S&Ls. This hypothesis is examined using S&L data for the 1976 through 1983 period. Modification of insolvency rules applied to S&Ls appears to have reduced significantly the co-movement of S&L stock returns with S&L portfolio holdings.

A framework for valuing floating-rate notes is developed to examine the effects of (1) lags in the coupon formula, (2) special contractual features and (3) default risk. Evidence from a sample of floaters indicates they sold at significant discounts. While lags in the coupon formulas and other contractual features make these notes more variable, they do not account for the magnitude of the discounts. We conclude that the fixed default premium in the coupon formula of a typical note is inadequate to compensate for time-varying default premiums demanded by investors, who treat other corporate short-term paper as close substitutes.