Dividends have long been acknowledged as profit-distributing mechanisms in classical corporate policy and are important in key investment and financial decision-making. Dividends have continued to be famously debated by scholars for almost a century. On various perspectives, many scholars have debated back and forth on their relevancy to firm performance and value.

Dividend smoothing is a well-known empirical phenomenon which is extensively described and analyzed in the financial literature. However, the motivation behind this widespread firm's policy is not totally understood. The signaling approach is one model employed to explain dividend smoothing: managers reduce information asymmetry between firm insiders and other stakeholders by maintaining dividends stable, thus signaling their confidence in the firm's future performance. Nevertheless, results from empirical studies are incomplete and ...

Bidders with high premiums will face a ‘winner’s curse’ dilemma, as a result reducing the subsequent synergy created through acquisition, while bidders with low premiums paid may result in a more profitable way after acquisition. Bargaining is an important aspect in negotiating beneficial terms and conditions. The bargaining power contributes to target’s and acquirer’s characteristics to bargain each other on the premium paid in acquisitions. Therefore, bargaining power in mergers and acquisitions provides some useful implications on how ...

This thesis tests five macroeconomic variables that have been both theorized to affect stock returns and been proven to do so in past empirical research. Those variables are risk premium, industrial production, term structure, expected inflation, and unexpected inflation. The variables are retested for their statistical significance using four years of monthly contemporary data using Thailand and Malaysia as two of the five ASEAN markets (Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia). Contrary to previous studies, this study finds ...

In this dissertation, the original Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) has been employed as the core theory across three studies in an attempt to establish a theoretical framework for determining the intention of street vendors to adopt a mobile commerce (m-commerce) application. The model has two tenets: perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Although the classical TAM is well known and well respected as a robust predictive framework, it seems to be situation specific and must be modified to accommodate other factors affecting the ...

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) measures the success of an organization by estimating the net value its customers contribute to the business over the lifetime of the relationship. How can organizations assess their customers’ lifetime value and offer strategies to retain those prospects and profitable customers? The first part of this dissertation offers an integrated view of methods to calculate CLV considering scenarios ranging from finite-and-infinite customer lifetimes to customer migration and Monte Carlo simulation models. In addition ...