Government bonds comove more strongly with bond-like stocks: stocks of large, mature, low-volatility, profitable, dividend-paying firms that are neither high growth nor distressed. Variables that are derived from the yield curve that are already known to predict returns on bonds also predict returns on bond-like stocks; investor sentiment, a predictor of the cross-section of stock returns, also predicts excess bond returns. These relationships remain in place even when bonds and stocks become “decoupled” at the index level. They are driven by a combination of effects including correlations between real cash flows on bonds and bond-like stocks, correlations between their risk-based return premia, and periodic flights to quality.

Financial markets appear to improve the allocation of capital. Across 65 countries, those with developed financial sectors increase investment more in their growing industries, and decrease investment more in their declining industries, than those with undeveloped financial sectors. The efficiency of capital allocation is negatively correlated with the extent of state ownership in the economy, positively correlated with the amount of firm-specific information in domestic stock returns, and positively correlated with the legal protection of minority investors. In particular, strong minority investor rights appear to curb overinvestment in declining industries.

We outline a dividend signaling model that features investors who are averse to dividend cuts. Managers with strong unobservable cash earnings pay high dividends but retain enough to be likely not to fall short next period. The model is consistent with a Lintner partialadjustment model, modal dividend changes of zero, stronger market reactions to dividend cuts than increases, comparatively infrequent and irregular repurchases, and a mechanism that does not depend on public destruction of value, which managers reject in surveys. New tests involve stronger reactions to changes from longer-maintained dividend levels and reference point currencies of American Depository Receipt dividends.

[Empirical evidence of imperfect integration across world capital markets suggests a role for cross-border arbitrage by multinationals. Consistent with multinational arbitrage as a determinant of foreign direct investment (FDI) patterns, we find that FDI flows increase sharply with source-country stock market valuations--particularly the component of valuations that is predicted to revert the next year, and particularly in the presence of capital account restrictions that limit other mechanisms of cross-country arbitrage. The results suggest the existence of a cheap financial capital channel in which FDI flows reflect, in part, the use of relatively low-cost capital available to overvalued parents in the source country.]

We propose and test a catering theory of nominal stock prices. The theory predicts that when investors place higher valuations on low-price firms, managers respond by supplying shares at lower price levels, and vice versa. We confirm these predictions in time-series and firm-level data using several measures of time-varying catering incentives. More generally, the results provide unusually clean evidence that catering influences corporate decisions, because the process of targeting nominal share prices is not well explained by alternative theories.

We document a close link between fluctuations in the propensity to pay dividends and catering incentives. First, we use the methodology of Fama and French (J. Finan. Econ. (2001)) to identify a total of four distinct trends in the propensity to pay dividends between 1963 and 2000. Second, we show that each of these trends lines up with a corresponding fluctuation in catering incentives: The propensity to pay increases when a proxy for the stock market dividend premium is positive and decreases when it is negative. The lone disconnect is attributable to Nixon-era controls.

Traditional capital structure theory predicts that reducing banks' leverage reduces the risk and cost of equity but does not change the weighted average cost of capital, and thus the rates for borrowers. We confirm that the equity of better-capitalized banks has lower beta and idiosyncratic risk. However, over the last 40 years, lower risk banks have not had lower costs of equity (lower stock returns), consistent with a stock market anomaly previously documented in other samples. A calibration suggests that a binding ten percentage point increase in Tier 1 capital to risk-weighted assets could double banks' risk premia over Treasury bills.

We study how investor sentiment affects the cross‐section of stock returns. We predict that a wave of investor sentiment has larger effects on securities whose valuations are highly subjective and difficult to arbitrage. Consistent with this prediction, we find that when beginning‐of‐period proxies for sentiment are low, subsequent returns are relatively high for small stocks, young stocks, high volatility stocks, unprofitable stocks, non‐dividend‐paying stocks, extreme growth stocks, and distressed stocks. When sentiment is high, on the other hand, these categories of stock earn relatively low subsequent returns.

We propose that the decision to pay dividends is driven by prevailing investor demand for dividend payers. Managers cater to investors by paying dividends when investors put a stock price premium on payers, and by not paying when investors prefer nonpayers. To test this prediction, we construct four stock price‐based measures of investor demand for dividend payers. By each measure, nonpayers tend to initiate dividends when demand is high. By some measures, payers tend to omit dividends when demand is low. Further analysis confirms that these results are better explained by catering than other theories of dividends.

It is well known that firms are more likely to issue equity when their market values are high, relative to book and past market values, and to repurchase equity when their market values are low. We document that the resulting effects on capital structure are very persistent. As a consequence, current capital structure is strongly related to historical market values. The results suggest the theory that capital structure is the cumulative outcome of past attempts to time the equity market.