The paper analyses the determinants of dividend payments and tests the hypothesis that companies pay dividends at the expense of investing in research and development (R&D). The evidence suggests that four fundamental factors – size, growth, profitability and risk – determine the decision to pay dividends but also to invest in R&D. Consistent with previous evidence, the average R&D intensity of...

This paper investigates the mechanism through which short selling of a bank’s stocks can trigger the failure of the bank. In the model, creditors, who learn information from stock prices, will grow increasingly unsure about the bank’s true fundamentals in facing noisier stock prices; thus a run on the bank is more likely because of creditors’ concave payo¤. Understanding this, speculators condu...

This paper investigates politically connected firms in Germany. With the introduction of a new transparency law in 2007, information on additional income sources for all members of the German parliament became publicly available. We find that members of the conservative party (CDU/CSU) and the liberal party (FDP) are more likely to work for firms than members of left-wing parties (SPD and The L...

Do Brokers Misallocate Customer Trades? Evidence from Futures Markets JEL Classification number: G12, G13, G18 In the context of futures markets, we study whether brokers allocate more favorable trades to their own accounts, and less favorable trades to their customers. We find that, within a thirty minute trading bracket, brokers on average buy at a lower price and sell at a higher price for t...

PURPOSE Despite beneficial effects of irradiation/chemotherapy on survival of glioblastoma (GBM) patients, collateral damage to intact neural tissue leads to "radiochemobrain" and reduced quality of life in survivors. For prophylactic neuroprotection, erythropoietin (EPO) is a promising candidate, provided that concerns regarding potential tumor promoting effects are alleviated. METHODS AND M...

ABSTRACT Complex disclosures have long been a major source of borrowers’ poor understanding mortgages. We examine the effect simplifying mortgage in difference-in-differences design around significant disclosure rule mandated by Consumer Financial Protection Bureau 2015. find that inexperienced borrowers (first-time home buyers) pay significantly lower interest rates after regulation than exper...

Arostrilepis beringiensis (Kontrimavichus et Smirnova, 1991) is redescribed on the basis of its type specimens from Lemmus trimucronatus (Richardson) and material from the collections of the Institute of Systematics and Ecology of Animals, Novosibirsk from the lemmings Myopus schisticolor (Lilljeborg) and Lemmus sibiricus (Kerr) from the Asian part of Russia. Specimens previously identified as ...

We evaluate the effect that payday loan access has on credit and labor market outcomes of individuals in the U.S. Army. Along with the conditional random assignment of servicemembers to different states, we employ three identification strategies using cross-sectional variation in state policies, within-state variation in payday lending laws over time, and difference-indifference analysis using ...