The Finance Brown Bag Seminar is held by the Institute for Finance, Banking and Insurance (WU Vienna) and the Vienna Graduate School of Finance (VGSF). It serves as a presentation platform for PhD students, faculty members, and visitors. An overview of BBS on the website of the Institute for Finance, Banking and Insurance.
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Jiri Knesl, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
Cash Return on U.S. Publicly-listed Stocks: When, How, and How Much
joint with Adlai Fisher (Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia)
We study lifetime firm-level cash returns to investors in U.S. public companies. Beyond traditional buy-and-hold, we emphasize the perspective of a representative investor who participates in all corporate actions including issuances, repurchases, and mergers, while tracking holdings through stock transactions. Consistent with Bessembinder (2018), cash returns are highly skewed, with about 25% of firms returning net positive cash throughout their lifetime. Controlling for standard predictors, firm age plays a significant and lasting role in net payouts, with a highly convex payout profile in age that becomes more pronounced in the second half of the sample. Delistings play a key role in cash returns, either immediately in cash acquisitions, or in stock acquisitions by accelerating the return of cash by acquirors. For the majority of companies, most of cash returned occurs at or after delisting, including mergers and acquisitions.
