Based on unbalanced panel dates of 4060 companies listed from 2003 2007 in Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Markets, this paper empirically studies the degree of product market competition, the relationship between cash dividends distribution tendency and cash dividends policy. Results show that controlling shareholders have significant motivation to distribute cash dividends, and this kind of incen...

Although firms have been distributing dividends to their shareholders for four centuries (Baskin, 1988), the motivation for this corporate policy is under debate in the academic community. In an early paper, Black (1976, p. 5) coined the term the “dividends puzzle” to illustrate the poor understanding of dividend payment policy: “The harder we look at the dividend picture, the more it seems lik...

This study investigates the excess funds hypothesis using samples of special dividends, regular dividend increases, and self-tender offers. All three types of firms tend to have funds in excess of industry norms before the events. The excess funds are largely nonrecurring for special dividend and self-tender offer firms and recurring for regular dividend increase firms. The analysis of the stoc...

We compare the dividend policies of privatelyand publicly-held firms in order to examine Lintner’s (1956) model of dividends, as wells as more recent agency-based and informationbased explanations of observed dividend behavior. Our findings suggest that both public and private firms exhibit a strong aversion to dividend cuts and omissions; however, public firms adhere to a consistent policy of ...

Many large U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) continued to pay dividends during the recent financial crisis, even as financial market conditions deteriorated, large losses accumulated, and emergency capital and liquidity were being provided by the official sector. In contrast, share repurchases by these BHCs dropped sharply in the early part of the crisis. Documenting this divergent behavior is...