Three essays on an event-driven investment strategy: Dividend adjustments, share repurchases, and market timing

This dissertation consists of three individual chapters. Chapter 1 documents that market responds negatively to dividend cuts and positively to dividend increases. Chapter 2 finds that firms hierarchally cut dividends and repurchases to meet their investment, or capital expenditure needs. Based on the analysis of Chapters 1 and 2, Chapter 3 discusses the discrepancy between firms and the market when firms adjust dividends, and shows that firms take advantage of this discrepancy to buy back shares