This paper examines the relative importance of earnings and operating cash flows in equity valuation. In contrast to previous studies that use stock returns or future operating cash flows, we use ex post intrinsic value of equity as the criterion for comparison. Ex post intrinsic value of equity is determined adopting both the discounted dividend and residual income models with ex post (future)...

This paper examines the causes and consequences of hedge fund activism. Hedge funds target profitable and healthy firms, with above-average cash holdings. The target firms earn significantly higher abnormal stock returns around the initial 13D filing date than a sample of control firm. However, they do not show improvements in accounting performances in the year after the initial purchase. Inst...

A profession serves a public purpose. Consequently, an outline of the history of the actuarial profession must follow the public purposes served by actuaries in applying their basic science. The formation in London in 1762 of the Society for Equitable Assurances on Lives and Survivorships as a mutual company, initiated a process that created a public purpose for actuaries. A mutual insurance co...

Payouts play an important role in the relationship between shareholders and agents in terms of rewarding the decisions of shareholders. Previous studies have observed that payout decisions appear in different ways depending on an industry's financial and operating structures. Since the airline industry has been characterized as high debt dependency, this study presumes distinctive characteristi...

This paper provides new evidence on the predictive power of dividend yields for U.S. aggregate stock returns. Following Miller and Modigliani, we construct a measure of the dividend yield that includes all cash flows to shareholders. We show that this alternative cash-flow yield has strong and stable predictive power for returns, and appears robust to a battery of tests that have been proposed ...