Corporate governance and dividend policy

The long-term return behaviour of dividend-changing firms has been investigated in the study and it is estimated that 23 percent only incremental profits are transformed into dividend. The remaining profits are utilized for the additional investment. It is also concluded that concentration of ownership is also an important factor of the dividend payments. The results support the hypothesis that companies start to pay dividends after a certain level of growth. At the earlier stage companies concentrate on retained earnings. The Ordinary Least Square (OLS) technique has been applied in the study and the model has been estimated through the pooled data of annual audited accounts of 180 listed companies of the Karachi Stock Exchange.