Dividend policy has long been an issue of interest in the financial literature. To date, a number of studies published on agency costs and dividend policy but most of them are on developed markets, It is well known that the emerging markets are quite different from developed markets in all respects. So, the existing published evidence is of limited relevance in identifying the influence of agen...

Recent empirical studies of dividend taxation have found that: (1) dividend tax cuts cause large, immediate increases in dividend payouts, and (2) the increases are driven by firms with high levels of share ownership among top executives or the board of directors. These findings are inconsistent with existing theories of dividend taxation. We show that an agency model in which managers and shar...

Using a sample of 22,389 US firm-year observations over the period from 1991 to 2012, we find that high CSR firms pay more dividends than low CSR firms. This is consistent with our expectation that socially responsible firms may use the dividend policy to manage the agency problems related to overinvestment in CSR. The analysis of individual components of CSR provides strong support for this ma...

In this short paper, we show how uctuation identities for Lévy processes with no positive jumps yield the distribution of the present value of dividend payments until ruin in a Lévy insurance risk model with a dividend barrier.

This note reinterprets methods that seek to use the aggregate dividend price ratio to predict aggregate stock market returns; specifically, methods which use information about time-varying changes in the dividend-price ratio process to improve the prediction equation. It argues that the empirical evidence is still too weak to suggest practical usefulness of these estimators. ∗We thank John Coch...

How do dividend policy decisions affect a firm’s stock price, is a widely researched topic in the field of investments and finance but still it remains a mystery that whether dividend policy affects the stock prices or not. There are those who suggest that dividend policy is irrelevant because they argue a firm’s value should be determine by the basic earning power and business risk of the firm...

The relative predictability of returns and dividends is a central issue because it forms the paradigm to interpret asset price variation. A little studied question is how dividend smoothing, as a choice of corporate policy, affects predictability. We show that even if dividends are supposed to be predictable without smoothing, dividend smoothing can bury this predictability. Because aggregate d...

This paper studies financial policy, investment decisions and the threat of dismissal when managers value control and investments generate manager-specific value. A high probability of investigation focuses the manager on the profitability of replacement and therefore managerspecific value. The probability of an investigation increases when the firm enters bankruptcy. Thus, high debt levels foc...

This paper analyzes dividend remittances by a large panel of foreign affiliates of U.S. multinational firms. The dividend policies of foreign affiliates, which convey no signals to public capital markets, nevertheless resemble those used by publicly held companies in paying dividends to diffuse common shareholders. Robustness checks verify that dividend policies of foreign affiliates are little...

This paper investigates the effects of capital gains and dividend taxes on excess returns around announcements of dividend increases and ex-dividend days for U.S. corporations. Consistent with standard no-arbitrage conditions, we find that the ex-dividend day premium increased from 2002 to 2004 when the dividend tax rate was cut. Consistent with the signalling theory of dividends, we also find ...