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Once the global leader in telecommunication systems and the Internet, over the past two decades the United States has fallen behind global competitors, and in particular China, in mobile communication infrastructure—specifically 5G and Internet of Things (IoT). This national failure, with the socioeconomic and geopolitical tensions that it creates, is not due to a lack of US government investment in the knowledge required for the mobility revolution. Nor is it because of a dearth of domestic demand for the equipment, devices, and applications that can make use of this infrastructure. Rather, the problem is the dereliction of key US-based business corporations to take the lead in making the investments in organizational learning required to generate cutting edge communication-infrastructure products. No company in the United States exemplifies this deficiency more than Cisco Systems, the business corporation founded in Silicon Valley in 1984 that had explosive growth in the 1990s to become the foremost global enterprise-networking equipment producer in the Internet revolution. This paper provides in-depth analysis of Cisco’s organizational failure, attributing it ultimately to the company’s turn from innovation in the last decades of 20th century to financialization in the early decades of the 21st century. Since 2001, Cisco’s top management has chosen to allocate corporate cash to open-market share repurchases— aka stock buybacks—for the purpose of giving manipulative boosts to the company stock price rather than make the investments in organizational learning required to become a world leader in communication-infrastructure equipment for the era of 5G and IoT. From October 2001 through October 2022, Cisco spent $152.3 billion—95 percent of its net income over the period—on stock buybacks for the purpose of propping up its stock price. These funds wasted in pursuit of “maximizing shareholder value” were on top of the $55.5 billion that Cisco paid out to shareholders in dividends, representing an additional 35 percent of net income. In this paper, we trace how Cisco grew from a Silicon Valley startup in 1984 to become, through its innovative products, the world leader in enterprise-networking equipment over the next decade and a half. As the company entered the 21st century, building on its dominance of enterprise-networking, Cisco was positioned to upgrade its technological capabilities to become a major infrastructureequipment vendor to service providers. We analyze how and why, when the Internet boom turned to bust in 2001, the organizational structure that enabled Cisco to dominate enterprise networking posed constraints related to manufacturing and marketing on the company’s growth in the more sophisticated infrastructure-equipment segment. We then document how from 2002 Cisco turned from innovation to financialization, as it used its ample profits to do stock buybacks to prop up its stock price. Finally, we ponder the larger policy implications of Cisco’s turn from innovation to financialization for the competitive position of the US information-and-communication technology (ICT) industry in the global economy.

Any period of economic crisis affects the solvency of companies. It gives rise to debates about whether listed companies should continue to pay dividends to shareholders, which is at the heart of the tensions between the company's stakeholders. This article provides an overview of the shareholder payout policies of major French listed companies and an analysis of the decisions taken during the health crisis of 2020.; Toute période de crise économique affecte la solvabilité des entreprises. Elle fait également naître des débats autour de l’opportunité pour les sociétés cotées de poursuivre les versements de dividendes aux actionnaires, au cœur des tensions entre parties prenantes de l’entreprise. Cet article propose un état des lieux des politiques de rémunération des actionnaires par les grandes sociétés françaises cotées et une analyse des décisions prises lors de la crise sanitaire de 2020.

International audience; This article analyzes the impact of employee share ownership and representation in governance structures on the performance and the payout policy of French listed companies. This empirical work is based on data from a combination of three sources (IODS, Eikon and Thomson Reuters) for a sample of French listed companies listed over the period 2000‑2014. Our results show that employee participation in corporate governance has different impacts. Employee share ownership helps to increase corporate profitability but also to limit dividend payments and share buyback practices. At the same time, employee participation in the Board of Directors (or Supervisory Board) moderates dividend payments to shareholders. These results provide new insights regarding the renewal of corporate governance and the evolution of payout policy.

Agency issues (the conflicts that arise due to the divergence of stakeholders’ interests within firms) remain a critical challenge faced by companies. Unfortunately, there is hardly any existing solution that can claim to mitigate all agency issues at the same time. In this study, I examine an original governance mechanism, widespread within French firms at the turn of the 20th century, which could do so: a statutory rule of profit allocation. It fixed in corporate statutes the part of profits to be allocated to a pre-determined set of agents. Contrary to other solutions, this rule could indeed be a way to solve several types of agency issues at the same time. Focusing on the allocations to shareholders, I show that this was the case: firms with more severe agency conflicts promised a higher part of profits to shareholders. I also provide evidence of the efficiency of this rule. Firms with more severe agency issues did not deviate too much from it (despite the specific deviations sometimes allowed) and distributed actual dividends close to the promised ones.

International audience; When firms want to buy back their own shares, they have a choice between several alternatives. If they often carry out open market repurchase, they also increasingly rely on banks through complex buyback contracts involving option components, e.g. accelerated share repurchase contracts, VWAP-minus profit-sharing contracts, etc. The entanglement between the execution problem and the option hedging problem makes the management of these contracts a difficult task that should not boil down to simple Greek-based risk hedging, contrary to what happens with classical books of options. In this paper, we propose a machine learning method to optimally manage several types of buyback contract. In particular, we recover strategies similar to those obtained in the literature with partial differential equation and recombinant tree methods and show that our new method, which does not suffer from the curse of dimensionality, enables to address types of contract that could not be addressed with grid or tree methods.

National audience; This paper focuses on dominant owners' use of leverage to finance their blockholdings and its relationship to dividend policy. We postulate that blockholder leverage may impact payout policy, in particular when earnings are hit by a negative shock. We use panel data for France where blockholders have tax incentives to structure their leverage in pyramidal holding companies and study the effect of the financial crisis in 2008/2009. We find no difference in payout policy and financial behavior during the 1999 to 2008 period between firms with levered owners and other firms. However, in the years 2009 to 2011 following the crisis, dividend payouts increase in proportion to pyramidal debt of dominant owners. We inspect pyramidal entities individually and find that on average only 60% of dividends are passed through to the ultimate owners, with the rest predominantly used to meet debt service obligations of the pyramidal entities.

We estimate the tax elasticity of dividends using two recent French re- forms: a hike in the dividend tax rate followed, five years later, by a cut. To follow the cash movements within the balance sheets of households and firms caused by these reforms, we use newly-accessible personal and cor- porate tax registries. Following the tax increase, the elasticity of dividends equals four and there is no shifting towards other personal income cate- gories. We find instead an increase in companies’ spending. After the tax decrease, payouts revert to their initial level, but not enough to offset the amounts received during the high-tax period.

International audience; This paper investigates how changes in the macro-financial environment impact the way in which capital market prices react to dividend announcements. Using a sample of 841 dividend announcements by French companies belonging to the SBF 120 Index, we examined the role of changes in ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty) level around the announcement date (implied volatility [VCAC] is used as an empirical proxy for ambiguity) on the response of investors to dividend information release. Based on the global sample and applying the interaction methodology we found that, consistent with ambiguity theory, an increase in VCAC leads investors to place more weight on bad dividend news than on good dividend news. When the sample is split, depending on the VCAC sign, results are more complex. We actually obtained a larger asymmetric impact between good and bad news for the larger window [-15; +15] but not for the smaller one [-1, +1]. Nevertheless, in this last case, we observed that, consistent with the ambiguity explanation, the reaction to good (bad) news decreases (increases) dramatically when ambiguity increases, compared to when ambiguity decreases.

Share repurchases announcement are discretionary transactions that stimulate analyst's activity. We use the multi-dimensional concept of informativeness to capture the integration of information in the stock prices. Our empirical test comprises American and European buybacks in the period 2000-2013. We refer to three independent measures of informativeness: the synchronicity measure introduced by Roll (1988), the Amihud (2002) illiquidity ratio, and the Llorente, Michaely, Saar, and Wang (2002) measure. We relate these three measures to analysts' activity in earning forecasting. We show that share repurchase decisions initiate a process, stimulate revisions by analysts, but do not systematically improve the informativeness of stock prices. An effective information process may develop if first it is pegged on negative cumulative abnormal return (CAR) values, and/or if the analysts are revising downward their earnings forecasts. We also highlight that informativeness improves asymmetrically depending on whether a change in the dividend policy occurs simultaneously.

International audience

This paper provides new evidence on dividend policy by studying optional stock dividends, a mechanism that allows firms to cut cash payouts without a negative market reaction. We find that highly leveraged firms with limited cash holdings and large institutional ownership are more likely to offer optional stock dividends to their hareholders. These firms are the most committed to paying dividends, and optional stock dividends provide them with an opportunity for a stealth cut in dividends during economic downturns. Shareholders overwhelmingly approve optional stock dividends at general meetings with the majority favoring stock dividends over cash dividends. Further, in contrast to dividend cuts, shareholders do not view optional stock dividends as bad news. Our results support the monitoring explanation of optional stock dividends and show that shareholders value a firm’s ability and willingness to pay dividends, even if the final cash payout is reduced.

In previous publications, we developed an indicator dedicated to measure the cost and the over-cost of financial capital, which consists in: i) the real weight of financial incomes paid by corporations compared to their effort of productive investment (cost of capital) ; ii) the share of this cost which can be attributed to a pure rent (the over-cost of capital). This indicator and the calculations conducted to arrive at it have received some criticisms. The main one is that we would have proceed in our indicator to an unjustified deflation of paid interests. So as to compute the real charge that interests make weigh on corporations, we actually applied a real interest rate to corporations' debt. This operation, according to our critics, is useless, and even amounts to the same thing as deflate twice the level of paid interests, since the denominator of our indicator is itself in current prices. In this article, we try to convince that we were right to proceed this way, and that it doesn't consist in a deflation operation. In reality, it's about the taking into consideration of the reductions linked to debt depreciation when inflation is around. As we will show, taking into account these reductions in the calculation of the cost of capital amounts to the same thing as applying a real interest rate to debts.; Hemos propuesto en publicaciones anteriores un indicador destinado a evaluar el costo y el « sobrecosto » de capital financiero, es decir : i) el peso real que representan los ingresos financieros pagados por la empresas con relación a su esfuerzo de inversión productiva (el costo del capital), y ii) la parte de ese costo que representa una renta pura (el sobrecosto del capital)Este indicador y los cálculos realizados para llegar a hacer las evaluaciones propuestas han recibido un cierto número de críticas. La mas importante de entre ellas es que nosotros habríamos procedido, en base al indicador elegido, una operación de deflación de los intereses pagados que es injustificado. Para calcular la carga real que los intereses que pesan sobre las empresas, nosotros efectivamente habíamos aplicado una tasa de interés sobre las deudas de las empresas.Esta operación, según nuestras críticas es inútil, e incluso llevaría a deflatar dos veces el monto de los intereses pagados, porque el denominador de nuestro indicador está expresado a precios corrientes. En este artículo, nosotros intentamos convencer de que habíamos tenido razón al proceder de ese modo, porque no se corresponde con una operación de deflación. Se trata en realidad de tomar en cuenta las economías relacionadas con la depreciación de la deuda, cuando hay inflación. Como se va demostrar, tomar en cuenta esas economías en el cálculo del costo de capital es lo mismo que aplicar una tasa de interés real sobre las deudas.; Nous avons proposé, dans des publications antérieures, un indicateur destiné à évaluer le coût et le « surcoût » du capital financier, c’est-à-dire : i) le poids réel que représentent les revenus financiers payés par les entreprises relativement à leur effort d’investissement productif (le coût du capital), et ii) la part de ce coût qui représente une pure rente (le surcoût du capital). Cet indicateur et les calculs menés pour aboutir aux évaluations proposées ont reçu un certain nombre de critiques. La plus importante d’entre elles est que nous aurions procédé, sur la base de l’indicateur retenu, à une opération de déflation des intérêts payés injustifiée. Pour calculer la charge réelle que les intérêts font peser sur les entreprises, nous avions en effet appliqué un taux d’intérêt réel aux dettes des entreprises. Cette opération, selon nos critiques, est inutile, et reviendrait même à déflater deux fois le montant des intérêts payés, puisque le dénominateur de notre indicateur est lui-même en prix courants. Dans cet article, nous essayons de convaincre que nous avons eu raison de procéder ainsi, et que cela ne correspond pas à une opération de déflation. Il s’agit en réalité de prendre en compte les économies liées à la dépréciation de la dette, lorsqu’il y a de l’inflation. Comme on le montrera, prendre en compte ces économies dans le calcul du coût du capital revient au même qu’appliquer un taux d’intérêt réel aux dettes.

We study the effect of dividend taxes on the payout and investment policies of publicly listed firms. To do so, we exploit a unique setting in Switzerland where, following the corporate tax reform of 2011, some but not all firms were suddenly able to pay tax-exempt dividends to their shareholders. Using a difference-in-differences specification, we show that treated firms swiftly and permanently increase their dividend payout by around 30% compared to control firms after the tax cut. When studying the effect of agency conflicts, we show that the impact on the payout is less pronounced for firms in which the controlling shareholders have more voting rights than cash-flow rights. We find a significant positive abnormal stock return after the announcement of the payment of a tax-exempt dividend. However, reducing dividend taxes does not boost investment. This is due to a significant drop in retained earnings and to the fact that equity issuances do not surge after the tax cut. Our evidence is consistent with models where the marginal source of finance is retained earnings, and inconsistent with the neoclassical theory of dividend taxation.

International audience; This paper tests the catering theory of dividend in the French market. It investigates how prevailing investor's demand for dividend payers proxied by the dividend premia affects the dividend policy. The dividend premia are measured at the market level and at the firm level. We find that the market demand for dividends measured by dividend premia affects the decision to start, to continue or to omit to pay dividends and the decision to increase the dividends. However, catering theory does not seem to affect the magnitude of the dividend changes since most results are not significant.

International audience; We study the causal effects of analyst coverage on corporate investment and financing policies. We hypothesize that a decrease in analyst coverage increases information asymmetry and thus increases the cost of capital; as a result, firms decrease their investment and financing. We use broker closures and broker mergers to identify changes in analyst coverage that are exogenous to corporate policies. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that firms that lose an analyst decrease their investment and financing by 1.9% and 2.0% of total assets, respectively, compared to similar firms that do not lose an analyst.

This article investigates the impact that prevailing investor demand for dividend payers and financial firm's characteristics have on the probability of starting or continuing to pay dividends. To test this prediction, we use probit regressions on panel data. The major finding that emerges from our analyses is: in large companies characterized by high profitability and low debt levels, investors' demand for dividend payers has a positive and significant impact on the probability that a manager will decide to pay positive dividends.

Cet article propose d'étudier -à travers des régressions multiples sur des données agrégées de panel- l'apport de l'imperfection comportementale dans la compréhension de la décision de distribution de la valeur créée aux profits des actionnaires des entreprises du SBF 250 entre 1990 et 2010. Les résultats obtenus montrent que le comportement de distribution des dirigeants des entreprises nouvellement introduites au SBF250 sur toute la période allant de 1990 et 2010 est impacté significativement et positivement par la prime de dividendes que les investisseurs attribuent aux entreprises distributrices.

This article proposes to study the dividend decision under the overconfident managers' approach by using a methodology resulting from the textual data analysis. We test the presence of the overconfidence biases' when managers decide to pay dividends for their shareholders. The intuition behind consists in supposing a greater propensity of overconfident managers with the dividend payment. The major finding that emerges from our analyses is: the managers of the SBF250 companies are more confidents when they talk about dividends and financial or accounting results; they are overconfident when they talk about the strategy, and finally managers are not or less confidents when their companies are exposed to an uncertain environment., Cet article propose d'étudier la décision de distribution du dividende sous l'approche des dirigeants surconfiants en utilisant une méthodologie issue de l'analyse des données textuelles. Il s'agit de tester la présence du biais d'excès de confiance chez les dirigeants lorsqu'ils décident de verser des dividendes à leurs actionnaires. L'intuition derrière consiste à supposer une plus grande propension des dirigeants surconfiants à la distribution du dividende. Les principaux résultats obtenus montrent que les dirigeants des grandes sociétés cotées en France sont assez confiants lorsqu'il s'agit du dividende ou des résultats comptables et financiers, surconfiants lorsqu'il s'agit de stratégie et ils sont peu confiants lorsque l'environnement est incertain.

International audience; This paper studies payout policies of listed family firms. The recent evolutions of family firms models bring to study two types of agency conflicts, the one between shareholders and manager (type I), and the one between majority and minority shareholders (type II). Our results show that payout policies are related to the intensity of the two types of agency conflicts which are overall less strong than in non family firms.; L'objectif de cette étude est d'analyser la relation entre les politiques de distribution des entreprises familiales cotées et deux grands types de conflits d'agence dans les entreprises familiales, entre actionnaires et dirigeant (type I), et entre actionnaires majoritaires et minoritaires (type II). Les résultats sur les entreprises du SBF 250 montrent que les montants distribués sont liés à ces deux composantes du conflit d'agence, qui est globalement moins fort dans les entreprises familiales.

ECGI Working Paper, n° 261/2009; ECGI Working Paper; This paper explores the use of leverage in pyramids and its relationship to dividend policy. The use of leverage in holding companies widens the disparity between control rights and cash flow rights. We postulate that it also leads to more generous dividend payouts since dividends are needed to service debt in the holding companies. We analyze a comprehensive sample of French pyramidal structures. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that dividend payouts increase in the disproportionality between control and cash flow rights that is explained by holding company debt. By contrast, disproportionality generated by holding company equity leads to lower payouts. Servicing debt in the holding companies of a pyramidal structure is the primary motive for dividends, as opposed to alternative explanations such as investments or dividend preferences. Finally, the combination of high leverage in holding companies and high dividends negatively affects firm value, consistent with the hypothesis of tunneling by dominant owners.

International audience; Stock option plans are used to increase managerial incentives, and business practices usually set the exercise price equal to the stock market price. The purpose of this paper is to underline the importance of a process of negotiation leading to a possible equilibrium contract satisfying both managers and shareholders. The two key variables of the model are the percentage of equity capital offered by the shareholders to the managers and the exercise price of the options that may be at a discount. We explicitly introduce risk aversion and information asymmetries in the form of (i) an economic uncertainty in the gain of cash flow, (ii) possibly biased information between the two parties and (iii) a noise in the valuation price of the stock in the market. The existence of a process of negotiation between shareholders and managers leading to a possible disclosure of private information is highlighted. As a conclusion, we show that “efficient” stock option plans should be granted in a context of trade-off between the percentage of capital awarded to managers and the discount in stock price

International audience; This paper tries to complement the purely quantitative approach of pay out policies by providing a qualitative description of dividend and share repurchase policies in France. Through a field study with 12 French decision-makers, it helps to understand explanatory elements of pay out policies. Our study provides evidence that pay out decision is the result of a consensus between various elements: financial capacity of the firm, external influences, and shareholding pressure. The paper supports elements from the literature: influence of financial variables, signal function of pay out and smoothing of dividend policy. It introduces new elements that may lead to interesting questioning: existence of pay out culture in firms, influence of managers' characteristics or competitors' behavior. And at last, it questions the share repurchase role of pay out, the role of taxes in pay out decisions and underlines majority shareholders' great influence.; Cet article s'attache avant tout à bousculer l'approche purement quantitative des politiques de dividende ou de rachat d'actions en présentant une description qualitative de ces politiques. Notre étude terrain auprès de 12 décideurs français apporte certes un éclairage hexagonal mais il permet surtout une meilleure compréhension des éléments explicatifs ou d'influence des politiques de distribution. Notre étude présente la distribution de liquidités aux actionnaires comme le résultat d'un consensus entre plusieurs variables : capacité financière de l'entreprise, influences externes et pression de l'actionnariat. Nos résultats confortent la fonction de signal de la distribution et la politique de lissage des dividendes. De nouveaux éléments venant renforcer la réflexion apparaissent : existence d'une culture de la distribution, influence des caractéristiques des managers et des concurrents. Enfin cet article remet en question le rôle de distribution des rachats d'actions et souligne la forte influence des actionnaires majoritaires.

This paper studies a unique buyback method allowing firms to reacquire their own shares on a separate trading line where only the firm is allowed to buy shares. This temporary trading platform is opened concurrently with the original trading line on the stock exchange. This share repurchase method is called the Second Trading Line and has been extensively used by Swiss companies since 1997. This type of repurchase is unique for two reasons. First, unlike open market programs, the repurchasing company does not trade under the cover of anonymity. Second, all transactions made by the repurchasing firm are publicly available in real time to every market participant. This is a case of instantaneous disclosure which contrasts sharply with other markets characterized by delayed or no disclosure. Using actual repurchase data from all buybacks implemented through second trading lines, we find that managers exhibit timing ability for the majority of programs. We also document that the daily repurchase decision is statistically associated with short-term price changes. However, we reject the opportunistic repurchase hypothesis and find no evidence that managers exploit their information advantage when reacquiring shares. We also find that repurchases on the second trading line have a beneficial impact on the liquidity of repurchasing firms (i.e., higher trading volumes, smaller bid-ask spreads, and thicker total depths). Exchanges and regulators may consider the second trading line an attractive share reacquisition mechanism because of its transparency and positive liquidity effects.