Narrow Results

Using a large sample of U.S. bank holding companies (BHC) from 2000:Q1–2017:Q4, we investigate the impacts of dividend policy to bank earnings management, and document that banks that pay dividends tend to be less opaque than banks that do not pay dividends. The dividend policy not only impacts the conditional average earnings management of banks, but also exerts influence on their dispersion. The impact of dividend policy appears to be more profound for highly opaque banks. We identify different conditions that motivate different discretionary behaviors of banks, which allows us to better observe different managerial motives between dividend-paying and dividend-non-paying banks. Under high information asymmetry context, there is valuably additional information conveyed by paying dividends, and it follows that the role of dividends as a means of conveying information is more pronounced. For banks subject to high agency problems, paying dividends make them to be less opaque through reducing the discretionary behaviors.

Over the last decade or so, we have been developing the possible existence of highly magnetized white dwarfs with analytical stellar structure models. While the primary aim was to explain the nature of the peculiar overluminous type Ia supernovae, later on, these magnetized stars were found to have even wider ranging implications including those for white dwarf pulsars, soft gamma-ray repeaters and anomalous X-ray pulsars, as well as gravitational radiation. In particular, we have explored in detail the mass-radius relations for these magnetized stars and showed that they can be significantly different from the Chandrasekhar predictions which essentially leads to a new super-Chandrasekhar mass-limit. Recently, using the stellar evolution code STARS, we have successfully modelled their formation and cooling evolution directly from the magnetized main sequence progenitor stars. Here we briefly discuss all these findings and conclude with their current status in the scientific community.