The role of effective corporate decisions in the creation of efficient portfolios

Chief executive officers and chief financial officers seek to implement corporate financial decisions that maximize the stock price and stockholder wealth. Real assets may be tangible, such as machinery or factories, or intangible, such as technical expertise or patents. These real assets must be paid for. To finance the real assets, the financial manager makes decisions regarding the magnitude of common stock issuance and stock repurchases, long-term debt issuance, and debt repurchases. Cash flows are generated by real assets, and the stockholders receive dividend payments based on the net income generated by the corporation. Empirical evidence shows that the dividend payment decision and stock and debt repurchase decisions can increase stock prices and returns. A variable, denoted as corporate exports—which incorporates the amount of dividends, net stock issuances, and net debt repurchases—is used as an expected return to create an initial efficient frontier. A stock selection model is used as a constraint in the portfolio process in conjunction with the corporate exports variable to further increase returns. We use a data mining corrections test for establishing the statistical significance of our portfolio returns.