We test the impact of taxes and governance systems on dividend payouts across countries. We show that, unlike previous studies, firms in strong investor protection countries pay lower cash dividends than in weak protection countries when the classical tax system is implemented, but they repurchase more shares to maximise their shareholders' after-tax returns. In weak protection countries, cash dividends and repurchases are low and less responsive to taxes. Our results suggest that when investors are protected, they weigh the tax cost of dividends against the benefit of mitigating the agency cost, but, when they are not, they accept whatever dividends they can extract, even when this entails high tax costs.

We analyze a uniquely constructed data set of open market share repurchases across a sample of European firms. We find that the announcement date market reaction is lower than that in the US, mainly because of (i) the relatively large number of recurring announcements which generate significantly lower returns than the initial announcements of intention to repurchase shares; (ii) the rather low market reaction in France, due probably to specific governance and corporate cultural issues; and (iii) the regulatory reform that allowed UK firms to keep the repurchased shares as treasury stock, which decreased their market impact. Across our countries, taxation, shareholder protection, and the European Union’s Market Abuse Directive do not affect significantly the market valuation of repurchases. Our results imply that ultimately, domestic institutional specificities and reforms play significant roles in the market valuation and popularity of share repurchases.

We analyze the reasons why companies issue units when they raise additional capital. We find that, in contrast to previous evidence, units are not offered to mitigate the agency conflicts or to signal security mispricing as they are predominantly issued during cold periods, in public rather than in rights offerings, and when the issue is underwritten. In addition, the results indicate that companies choose to offer units to increase their offer price flexibility and to underprice their seasoned equity offering so as to minimize the issue cost and the risk of failure of the issue. These results provide support for the net proceeds maximization hypothesis.