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The purpose of this paper is to investigate payout smoothing in two emerging markets – China and Taiwan. The authors conduct a comparative study of two emerging market economies that have common cultural and historical characteristics but have experienced different government systems and different approach to the market-based system.

The authors collect firm-level data from Standard and Poor's Compustat Global database, which covers 5,298 public firms in China and Taiwan during the period 1996–2015, and use a variance decomposition methodology to estimate the smoothness of corporate payout in a common empirical framework that includes net income, and debt and investment policies.

Overall, the empirical findings support recently proposed theories of joint determination of corporate payout behavior with debt and investment policies. The authors find that debt and investment policies absorb the majority of shocks to net income, and that debt policy is the main shock absorber. Furthermore, the authors show that firms in China follow a similar strategy with their counterparts in United States and smooth their payout. In contrast to firms in China and US, the payout of the Taiwanese firms is relatively highly sensitive to net income shocks.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to use a joint model to empirically investigate the extent to which debt and investment policies are used to keep corporate payout smooth in emerging markets.

This paper aims to use statistical analyses to understand the trends on housing liquidity and pricing by accounting for macroeconomic factors that vary at national level and at metropolitan statistical area level for all metropolitan statistical areas in Texas. In addition, the authors test for seasonality in all the metropolitan statistical areas in Texas.

Using publicly available data from Zillow a listing website, the authors conduct an analysis of all housing markets at metropolitan statistical area level in Texas to understand the factors that drive the liquidity and pricing. The authors use two measures for liquidity, namely, time to sell the house and sales to list ratio. The authors also try to understand the decision to lower the price of the listed houses. In addition, the authors conduct a test for seasonality within the year in these housing markets.

The analyses conclude that there is a significant impact of listing prices, unemployment rates, 30-year mortgage rates, consumer sentiment and oil price changes on the liquidity of the housing markets and decisions of sellers to adjust the prices down. In addition, the authors provide evidence of the existence of seasonality in most metropolitan statistical areas in Texas both for pricing and volume of transactions.

This is the first study to look at housing liquidity and pricing trends for about 25 markets in Texas. In addition, the authors provide evidence of the importance of oil prices for the housing markets in Texas metropolitan statistical areas.

The purpose of this paper is to study the payout policy for public firms in different countries. The authors are interested to understand the similarities and differences in the behavior of firms across different countries.

The authors use firm-level data collected from Compustat Global for public firms across the world. The sample consists of more than 23,000 firms for the period 1990–2015 in 94 countries. The authors estimate the corporate payout in an empirical model that incorporates other corporate financing decisions, such as investment and debt policies.

The findings support recent corporate governance theory, which asserts that payout policy is influenced by investment and debt policies, and cannot be determined independently. Furthermore, the authors find that geographic/cultural/institutional variation influence the response of payout policy to other corporate financing decisions. Additional tests are presented to demonstrate the robustness of the main findings.

The interpretation of the results for certain regions could be limited due to data availability. The authors believe the authors have a good coverage especially for countries in Asia, relative to the other regions.

To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first one to look at payout policy and its relationship with investment and debt policy in such a large scale of firms across the world with coverage of 94 countries and 16 years. The authors document differences in public firms’ attitudes toward payout policy according to geographic/cultural/institutional reasons.

Many studies have shown that the intensity and the number of hurricanes are likely to increase. This paper aims to look at the immediate effects of hurricanes on the time on the market, share of houses sold and percentage of houses with price cuts in the housing market using the metropolitan statistical area-level data in Florida.

Using a difference-in-difference method, the authors estimate the impact that a hurricane has on the housing markets.

The authors find that a hurricane has a positive and significant effect on the time on the market. A hurricane leads to a delay of the sale of a typical house in Florida by five days. The authors test for within-year seasonality and show that these effects change with seasonality of the housing market. Markets with seasonal housing prices tend to be affected more by hurricanes than those where housing prices are not seasonal. The authors also show that effects of a hurricane are transient and fade away in a few months. The results remain significant as the hurricane intensity changes.

This is the first study to look at the short-term effects of the hurricanes and how their effects vary based on seasonality of the markets.

The purpose of this article is to empirically explore the sensitivity of payouts to cash flows and the other financing decisions, such as debt and investment, of firms.

Using panel regressions based on COMPUSTAT data for 7,544 public firms during the period 1973–2013, we estimate the sensitivity of total payouts. Specifically, following the theory presented in Lambrecht and Myers (2012), we test the interdependent financing decisions of the firm. First, we compute total payout as the sum of cash dividends and net stock repurchases; second, we examine the sensitivity of total payouts to changes in the firm’s net income, debt and investment. Furthermore, we present several tests to demonstrate the robustness of our results.

We suggest evidence in support of the theory in Lambrecht and Myers (2012) showing that there is a negative relationship between total payouts and investment. Furthermore, we find that total payouts are positively associated with net income and debt of the firm.

Previous research has shown how cash flows affect different financing decisions, but it is not clear how total payouts are sensitive to other financing decisions. The focus of this paper is the response of total payouts to investment policy, debt financing policy and changes in cash flows.