This paper aims to clarify a characteristic of the dividend policies of Japanese firms by verifying the dividend life-cycle theory. The analysis revealed that in Japan, growing firms choose further dividend increases compared to mature firms, and that such dividend increases by the growing firms...

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...

We examine the e¤ects of dividend policies on 469 British firms between 1895 and 1905. These firms operated in an environment of very low taxation and an absence of institutional constraints. We find strong support for asymmetric information/signaling theories of dividend policy, and little...

The literature on dividend policy and its relationship to stock returns relies on two important concepts: information asymmetry and agency theory both of which suggesting that there should be a positive relationship between dividend changes and stock returns. In this paper, we investigate...

The signaling or information content hypothesis is amongst the most prominent theories attempting to explain dividend policy decisions. However, no research has, to date, examined the information content of dividends in conjunction with generalized economic adversity. With the majority of the...

Since 2004, Chinese government requests the local banks to invite foreign financial institutions to be one or more of the large shareholders in the local banks. These foreign financial institutions are commonly referred to as the foreign strategic investors (FSIs), whose aim is to improve the...

China has sustained a rapid rate of economic growth and absorbed a great deal of foreign investment over the past decades. However, the laws pertaining to business in China have not kept up with China’s market growth. For this reason, investors in the Chinese stock market must assess...

One of the central puzzles of signaling theory is how to assess signal quality, in particular the potential for signal mimicking. Our study provides evidence of signal mimicking in the context of stock repurchases. Employing an ex-ante proxy for the likelihood of mimicking stock repurchases and...

We analyze simultaneous announcements of current dividends, current earnings and management forecasts of next year's earnings. By conducting the empirical analysis using Danish data, this study is the first not to suffer from problems related to low levels of agency costs and informational...

This paper is the first research project to have analyzed commemorative dividends. Commemorative dividends have the unique property of having both a respectable degree of binding and high flexibility. The former makes commemorative dividends positively correlated with stock prices, while the...