This paper investigates whether board diversity has a significant impact on corporate payout decisions. Previous studies exclusively focus on examining the relation between a measure of firm performance and board diversity. The major advantage of our study is to investigate the direct impact of...

Motivated by agency theory, we investigate how a firm’s overall quality of corporate governance affects its dividend policy. Using a large sample of firms with governance data from The Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), we find that firms with stronger governance exhibit a higher...

Theory suggests that religious piety is associated with greater risk aversion and more conservative financial policies. Returns to shareholders through dividends are much more certain than returns through capital gains expected to be realized far into the future. We hypothesize that religious...