We are incredibly proud to announce that Professors Roni Michaely (The University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Business and Economics), Joan Farre-Mensa (University of Illinois at Chicago), and Martin Schmalz (University of Oxford) have been awarded the prestigious Sharpe Award for the Best Paper published in the 2025 Volume of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (JFQA)!

Their award-winning paper, “Financing Payouts,” challenges traditional views on corporate finance by highlighting the close relationship between payout and capital structure decisions.

Key Insights:
The paper finds that 43% of firms making payouts also raise capital in the same year, with 31% of all payout dollars coming from external financing, mostly debt. This indicates that payouts are often used strategically to manage leverage and cash, rather than merely distributing excess funds.

Winning the Sharpe Award is an impressive achievement and a testament to the rigorous, world-class research being conducted by our scholars here at HKUBS.

Please join us in congratulating Prof. Roni Michaely and his co-authors on this exceptional milestone!