Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relative preference for dividends vs share repurchases based on managers’ personal wealth and control benefits. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents an analytical model of managerial preferences and information advantages, and analyses how the choice between dividends and repurchases relates to the manager's personal objectives in this setting. The approach specifies preferences consistent with the agency theory of economics. Findings It is found that, when managers can influence share price prior to a repurchase, due to their superior information, repurchases present an opportunity to increase managerial wealth relative to dividends. In addition, if managers can influence the post‐repurchase share price, due to an upward sloping supply curve for the company's stock, repurchases present an opportunity to protect the managers’ personal benefits of control. The ability to protect control depends on the toehold purchased by potential acquirers, and on the source of the upward‐sloping supply. Repurchases are less protective when toeholds are small and the supply curve reflects tax lock‐in effects. Practical implications The results indicate that managerial concerns over their personal wealth or ability to maintain control of the firm can influence the method of corporate distributions. As such, market valuations and the market reaction to distribution announcements may reflect these managerial concerns. This could be an important determinant of investor stock choices. Originality/value The factors determining firms’ payout methods remains a topic of significant importance and debate. The method of analysis here is new, and the insights into managerial preferences, toeholds and payout decisions help to inform this debate.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".