This paper describes a new dataset of annual time series relating to the US nonfinancial corporate sector: its market value, returns, and the major underlying stocks and flows that are valued by financial markets. The data cover the entire twentieth century, and thus fill a significant gap in the documentation of financial and real economy linkages. Previously available data cover either shorte...

This article documents how the changing composition of U.S. publicly traded firms has prompted a decline in the long-run mean of the aggregate dividend-price ratio, most notably since the 1970s. Adjusting the dividend–price ratio for such changes resolves several issues with respect to the predictability of stock market returns: The adjusted dividend-price ratio is less persistent, in-sample ev...

We characterize the joint dynamics of expected returns, stochastic volatility, and prices. In particular, with a given dividend process, one of the processes of the expected return, the stock volatility, or the price-dividend ratio fully determines the other two. For example, the stock volatility determines the expected return and the price-dividend ratio. By parameterizing one, or more, of exp...

This paper tests whether the 2003 dividend tax cut—one of the largest reforms ever to a US capital tax rate—stimulated corporate investment and increased labor earnings, using a quasi-experimental design and US corporate tax returns from years 1996–2008. I estimate that the tax cut caused zero change in corporate investment and employee compensation. Economically, the statistical precision chal...

In this paper we develop a framework for optimal investment decisions for insurance companies under unhedgeable risk. The perspective that we choose is from an insurance company that tries to maximise the stream of dividends paid to its shareholders. The policy instruments that the company has are the dividend policy and the investment policy. The insurance company can continue to pay dividends...

Using more than 112,000 firm-year observations in 33 countries, we find that two Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation, remain significant in the determination of dividend policy even after controlling for governance and firm-specific factors. When uncertainty avoidance is high, only firms in countries with stronger investor protection pay more dividend...

This paper investigates the relationship between real earnings growth, real dividend growth, the dividend payout ratio and real stock returns in the US and UK between 1900-2001. We find a positive relationship in the UK between the payout ratio and subsequent real earnings growth contrary to conventional theory, though consistent with the US evidence presented by Arnott and Asness (2003). By co...

State-space or latent-variable models for stock prices specify a process for expected returns and expected and unexpected dividend growth, and then derive dividend yields and returns from a present value relations. They are a useful structure for understanding and interpreting forecasting relations. In this note, I connect state-space representations with their observable counterparts, and VAR/...

This paper presents a numerical scheme that avoids iterations to solve the nonlinear partial differential equation system for pricing American puts with constant dividend yields. Upon applying a frontfixing technique to the Black-Scholes partial differential equation, a predictor-corrector finite difference scheme is proposed to numerically solve the discrete nonlinear scheme. In the comparison...

In this note we value and hedge European options on assets paying discrete stochastic dividends. Our hedging strategy is based only on the underlying asset, risk-free bonds and dividend strips. Our simple strategy is easily seen to be compatible with early results based, among other things, on the existence of a dividend forward contract. Such contracts, however, are not traded in the market pl...