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 shareownership among top executives or the board of directors. These findings are inconsistent with existing "old view" and "new view" theories of dividend taxation. We propose a simple alternativ...

We derive representations for the stock price drift and volatility in the equilibrium of agents with arbitrary, heterogeneous utility functions and with the aggregate dividend following an arbitrary Markov diffusion. We introduce a new, intrinsic characteristic of the aggregate dividend process that we call the ”rate of discounting volatility” and show that, in equilibrium, the size of market p...

The dividend policy is one of the most debated topics in the finance literature. According to the dividend signalling hypothesis, which has motivated a significant amount of theoretical and empirical research, dividend change announcements trigger share returns because they convey information about management’s assessment on firms’ future prospects. Consequently, a dividend increase (decrease) ...

This paper develops and tests a dynamic, sequential equilibrium model of corporate cash payout policy that endogenizes a firm's dividend initiation decision, and its extreme reluctance to subsequently cut dividends in a sequential equilibrium. After payment of dividends, all excess cash is disgorged via stock repurchases that elicit no price reactions. The theoretical model generates results co...

Due to the overwhelming international evidence that stock prices drop by less than the dividend paid on ex-dividend days, the ex-dividend day anomaly is considered a stylized fact. Two main approaches have emerged to explain this empirical regularity: the tax-clientele hypothesis and the microstructure of financial markets. Although the most widely accepted explanation for this fact relies on t...

This paper derives a key monotonicity property common to all dividend signalling models: the greater the rate that dividend income is taxed relative to capital gains income, the greater the value of information revealed by a given dividend, and hence the greater the associated excess return. This monotonicity condition is tested with robust non-parametric techniques. No evidence is found to sup...

The paper incorporates liquid reserves, interest and dividends in the compound Poisson surplus model. When an insurer’s surplus is below a certain level, it is kept as liquid reserves. As the surplus attains the level, the excess of the surplus above the level will earn interest at a constant interest rate. If the surplus continues to surpass a higher level, the excess of the surplus above this...

We ask whether stock returns in France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US are predictable by three instruments: the dividend yield, the earnings yield and the short rate. The predictability regression is suggested by a present value model with earnings growth, payout ratios and the short rate as state variables. We find the short rate to be the only robust short-run predictor of excess returns,...

Explaining dividend policy has been one of the most difficult challenges facing financial economists. Despite decades of study, we have yet to completely understand the factors that influence dividend policy and the manner in which these factors interact.The aim of this paper is to examine the relation between dividend policy and share price volatility in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). The analys...

Graham: “It is important for the student to understand why this pleasingly simple method of valuing a common stock or group of stocks had to be replaced by more complicated methods, especially in the growth-stock field. It would work fairly plausibly for assumed growth rates up to, say, 5 percent. The latter figure produces a required dividend return of only 2 percent, or a multiplier of 33 for...