Miller and Modigliani (1961) show that in perfect and complete financial markets a firm's value is unaffected by its dividend policy. Much of the more recent research has demonstrated that dividend policy becomes important in the presence of taxation, asymmetric information, incomplete contracts, institutional constraints, and transaction costs. By examining the effects of dividend policies on 475 British firms existing between 1895 and 1905, and consequently operating in an environment of very low taxation with an absence of institutional constraints, we find strong support for asymmetric information theories of dividend policy, and little support for agency models.

We consider an economy that has to decide how assets are to be used. Agents have ideas, but these ideas conflict. We suppose that decision‐making authority is determined by hierarchy: each asset has a chain of command, and the most senior person with an idea exercises authority. We analyze the optimal hierarchical structure given that some agents coordinate and other specialize. Among other things, our theory explains why coordinators should typically be senior to specialists and why pyramidal hierarchies may be optimal. Our theory also throws light on the optimal degree of decentralization inside a firm and on firm boundaries.

This paper provides a framework for addressing the question of when transactions should be carried out within a firm and when through the market. Following Grossman and Hart, we identify a firm with the assets that its owners control. We argue that the crucial difference for party 1 between owning a firm (integration) and contracting for a service from another party 2 who owns this firm (nonintegration) is that, under integration, party 1 can selectively fire the workers of the firm (including party 2), whereas under nonintegration he can "fire" (i.e., stop dealing with) only the entire firm: the combination of party 2, the workers, and the firm's assets. We use this idea to study how changes in ownership affect the incentives of employees as well as those of owner-managers. Copyright 1990 by University of Chicago Press.

ABSTRACT We obtain daily data for warrants traded on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange between 1909 and 1922, and for a broker's call option quotes on stocks from 1908 to 1911. We use this new data set to test how close derivative prices are to Black–Scholes (1973) prices and to compute profits for investors using a simple trading rule for call options. We examine whether investors exercised warrants optimally and how they reacted to extensions of the warrants' durations. We show that long before the development of the formal theory, investors had an intuitive grasp of the determinants of derivative pricing.

Blaine Huntsman, Basil J. Moore, Robert M. Soldofsky, Session Topic: Asset Management and Monetary Policy: Discussion, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 24, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association Chicago, Illinois December 28-30, 1968 (May, 1969), pp. 239-247

We analyze the role of debt in persuading an entrepreneur to pay out cash flows, rather than to divert them. In the first part of the paper we study the optimal debt contract—specifically, the trade-off between the size of the loan and the repayment—under the assumption that some debt contract is optimal. In the second part we consider a more general class of (nondebt) contracts, and derive sufficient conditions for debt to be optimal among these.

Consider an entrepreneur who needs to raise funds from an investor, but cannot commit not to withdraw his human capital from the project. The possibility of a default or quit puts an upper bound on the total future indebtedness from the entrepreneur to the investor at any date. We characterize the optimal repayment path and show how it is affected both by the maturity structure of the project return stream and by the durability and specificity of project assets. Our results are consistent with the conventional wisdom about what determines the maturity structure of long-term debt contracts.

Charles Bean, Mathias Dewatripont, John Moore; Special Issue: The Econometrics of Financial Markets, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 58, Issue 3, 1