Using the Johansen cointegration technique, we find empirical evidence of long run comovements between five national stock market indexes and measures of aggregate real activity including the real oil price, real consumption, real money, and real output. Real returns on these indexes are typically related to transitory deviations from the long run relationship and to changes in the macroeconomi...

A general framework is developed to analyze the optimal stopping (exercise) regions of American path dependent options with either Asian feature or lookback feature. We examine the monotonicity properties of the option values and stopping regions with respect to the interest rate, dividend yield and time. From the ordering properties of the values of American lookback options and American Asian...

We evaluate predictive regressions that explicitly consider the time-variation of coefficients in a comprehensive Bayesian framework. This allows for fast and consistent adjustment of regression coefficients to changes in the underlying economic relationships (e.g., changes in the regulatory environment) as we document explicitly for the coefficient of the dividend yield. For monthly returns of...

In this paper we consider an optimal dividend problem for an insurance company which risk process evolves as a spectrally negative Lévy process (in the absence of dividend payments). We assume that the management of the company controls timing and size of dividend payments. The objective is to maximize the sum of the expected cumulative discounted dividends received until the moment of ruin and...

States are increasingly turning to environmental taxes as a means of raising revenue. These taxes are often thought to generate a double dividend: an environmental dividend stemming from the environmental improvement, and an economic dividend resulting from use of the revenue from environmental taxes to reduce other distortionary taxes (e.g., income or sales taxes). We review the economic liter...

The effect of dividend taxes on dividend payments is a topic of considerable debate with repercussions for the cost of capital and investment. The traditional view of dividends suggests that dividend taxes lead to lower dividends, a higher cost of capital and so lower investment. In contrast, according to the new, or trapped equity, view, dividend taxes are neutral to dividend payout, the cost ...

We consider the problem of maximizing the expected utility of discounted dividend payments of an insurance company. The risk process, describing the insurance business of the company, is modeled as Brownian motion with drift. We mainly consider power utility and special emphasis is given to the limiting behavior when the coefficient of risk aversion tends to zero. We then find convergence of th...

This study investigates the market reaction to dividend change announcements at the Istanbul Stock Exchange. A sample of 184 announcements made by 46 companies during the period 2005 to 2008 is analyzed by using the event study methodology. The results suggest that the market reacts positively to dividend increases, negatively to dividend decreases and does not react when dividends are not chan...

We consider an insurance company whose surplus follows a diffusion process with proportional reinsurance and impulse dividend control. Our objective is to maximize expected discounted dividend payouts to shareholders of the company until the time of bankruptcy. To meet some essential requirements of solvency control e.g., bankruptcy not soon , we impose some constraints on the insurance company...