We analyze a firm’s choice between dividends and stock repurchases under heterogeneous beliefs. Firm insiders, owning a certain fraction of equity, choose between paying out cash available through a dividend payment or a stock repurchase, and simultaneously choose the scale of the firm’s project. Outsiders have heterogeneous beliefs about project success and may disagree with insiders. In equilibrium, the firm distributes value through dividends alone, through a repurchase alone, or through a combination of both. In some situations, the firm may raise external financing to fund its payout. We also develop results for long-run stock returns following dividends and repurchases. (JEL G32, G35) Received June 2, 2020; editorial decision November 3, 2020 by Editor Andrew Ellul.

We find that the movement of urban house prices in the U.S. has become more synchronized since the early 2000s. The elevated comovement is substantial, widespread, occurring for the majority of city-pairs, and continued even after the housing market turned to bust in 2007. We investigate whether and to what extent the comovement increase can be explained by banking integration following deregulations in the banking industry. Utilizing novel measures of city-level banking integration based on bank deposit data, we find that an increase in banking integration leads to an increase in the comovement of urban house prices. City-pairs that are more connected through national banking system had experienced a greater increase in comovement, after controlling for a variety of explanatory variables. Our findings can be interpreted as spillover effect, rather than substitution effect, of banking integration at work.

Most firms covary more positively with downmarkets than upmarkets—a phenomenon I refer to as “risk asymmetry.” I predict and find that risk asymmetry is caused, at least in part, by a firm's ability to selectively obfuscate poor performance. Risk asymmetry decreases significantly when firms are required to adhere to the more stringent auditing standards mandated under Section 404 of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act, however this decrease is more muted for firms with weak internal controls. Consistent with my predictions, these patterns are stronger for more market‐sensitive firms and weaker for firms that include relative performance evaluation in their CEOs' pay packages. Taken together with prior literature (which documents that risk asymmetry is priced), my results suggest that a firm can lower its cost of capital by credibly reducing its ability to obfuscate value‐relevant information.

We examine the relationship between bank bailouts and sovereign risk in 35 countries and 19 bailouts from 2005 to 2015. Bailouts negatively affect sovereign ratings, with rating agencies consistently perceiving higher risk when a country’s banking system has been rescued (risk-increasing effect). The increase in public debt as a result of the bank bailouts is the main mechanism through which the risk-increasing effect occurs. Moreover, financial soundness and banking market structure shape the impact of bailouts on sovereign risk. In particular, proactiveness in undertaking public bailouts for banking systems that are largely distressed – that is, risky and low profitable – and highly concentrated seems to lead to smaller increases in sovereign risk. However, the strength of the connection between the public sector and the banking system neither moderates nor magnifies the impact of bailouts. Furthermore, rating dynamics (duration, momentum, and timing) reinforce the importance and duration of the effect of bailouts on sovereign ratings. The results are robust to endogeneity concerns, sample selection bias and several robustness tests.

We investigate the new reality of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). We show that most ETFs are active investments in form (designed to generate alpha) or function (serve as building blocks of active portfolios). We define a new activeness index to capture these dimensions, finding that the cross-section of ETFs is now increasingly characterized by highly active investment vehicles. Active-in-form ETFs have positive flow-performance sensitivity, charge the highest fees among ETFs, and have high within-portfolio turnover. Active-in-function ETFs have more concentrated holdings, less within-portfolio turnover, but higher turnover in the secondary market. We show how more active ETFs are gaining market share over less active ETFs, leading to competitive fee pressure both within the ETF space and across the investment management industry. We suggest that the growing activeness of ETFs may assuage concerns about ETFs harming price discovery.

Firms with negative net cash flows (NCFs) play an empirically important role in recent decades’ increase in the average cash-balance ratio of publicly held non-financial firms. Since 1971, negative NCFs have become much more pervasive, persistent, and greater in magnitude, and these patterns hold within the growing set of firms that have high intangible capital. In recent years, firms with negative NCFs tend to build cash balances through frequent equity offerings. The high cash balances tend to be transitory as subsequent negative NCFs lead firms to rapid cash-balance drawdowns, often followed by new stock sales and cash stockpiling of the proceeds. We conclude that funding needs and staged equity financing by negative NCF firms are central features of the secular rise in the average cash-balance ratio.

This study examines changes in SEC enforcement and firm cooperation after the SEC introduced its new cooperation program in 2010. While previous research shows that the SEC penalized cooperative firms prior to 2010, our results suggest that after that year, it rewarded cooperation, especially good faith actions. We also find that after 2010, the SEC increased mentions of cooperation in public speeches and publicized more details about firm cooperative activities in AAERs. Finally, we find some evidence that misconduct firms increased good faith cooperation after the SEC revised its cooperation program in 2010. Our findings suggest that having a more explicit leniency program improves its effectiveness.

I propose to identify an SVAR, up to shock ordering, using the autocovariance structure of the squared innovations implied by an arbitrary stochastic process for the shock variances. These higher moments are available without parametric assumptions on the variance process. In contrast, previous approaches exploiting heteroskedasticity rely on the path of innovation covariances, which can only be recovered from the data under specific parametric assumptions on the variance process. The conditions for identification are testable. I compare the identification scheme to existing approaches in simulations and provide guidance for estimation and inference. I use the methodology to estimate fiscal multipliers peaking at 0.86 for tax cuts and 0.75 for government spending. I find that tax shocks explain more variation in output at longer horizons. The empirical implications of my estimates are more consistent with theory and the narrative record than those based on some leading approaches.