Macro variables and the components of stock returns

We conduct a decomposition for the stock market return by incorporating the information from 124 macro variables. Using factor analysis, we estimate six common factors and run a VAR containing these factors and financial variables such as the market dividend yield and the T-bill rate. Including the macro factors does not have a significant impact in the estimation of the components of aggregate (excess) stock returns—cash-flow, discount-rate, and interest-rate news. Using the macro factors in the computation of cash-flow and discount-rate news does not significantly improve the fit of a two-factor ICAPM for the cross-section of stock returns.     

Explaining Returns with Cash-Flow Proxies

Stock returns are correlated with contemporaneous earnings growth,dividend growth, future real activity, and other cash-flow proxies.The correlation between cash-flow proxies and stock returnsmay arise from association of cash-flow proxies with one-periodexpected returns, cash-flow news, and/or expected-return news.We use Campbell’s (1991) return decomposition to measurethe relative importance of these three effects in regressionsof returns on cash-flow proxies. In some of the popular specifications,variables that are motivated as proxies for cash-flow news alsotrack a nontrivial proportion of one-period expected returnsand expected-return news. As a result, the R² from a regressionof returns on cash-flow proxies may overstate or understatethe importance of cash-flow news as a source of return variance.     

The cross-section of equity returns and assets’ fundamental cash-flow risk

The decomposition of consumption beta into a component driven by assets’ cash-flow news and one related to assets’ discount-rate news reveals that macroeconomic risks embodied in cash flows largely account for the cross-sectional dynamics of average stock returns. Empirically, we find that differences in expected excess returns between low book-to-market and high book-to-market portfolios are associated with differences in their cash-flow betas, and thus reflect macroeconomic, especially consumption-related risks. This result holds true for a broad set of consumption-based asset pricing models. In addition, the results indicate that the risk premium on equity markets is primarily driven by the exposure of assets’ cash-flow components to the cyclical variability of durable consumption goods.     

A Note on the Stock Market Reaction to Dividend Announcements

In this paper, we examine the stock market reaction to dividend announcements. A sample of dividend increases and decreases is partitioned by payout ratio increases and decreases. Previous research has examined the differential reaction to payout ratio increases and decreases only for dividend increases. In addition to an event study, cross-sectional regressions are estimated using the percent changes in payout ratio and dividend to explain abnormal returns. We conclude that payout ratio changes appear to be only an artifact of an earnings stream that is more variable than the dividend stream, rather than revealing any significant shifts in managerial policy.     

Stock liquidity and dividend policy: Evidence from an imputation tax environment

This paper investigates the impact of stock market liquidity on firms' dividend payout policy in the Australian market. The finding suggests that stock liquidity positively relates to firm dividend payouts. The result holds after controlling for different model estimations and different measures of stock liquidity/dividend. To address endogeneity issue, I use the removal of broker identities by the ASX in 2005 as an exogenous shock to stock liquidity. The result suggests that there is an increase in stock liquidity around this shock, leading to an increase in firm dividend, suggesting a causal effect of stock liquidity on firm dividend. I further document that stock liquidity enhances firm dividend through reducing cash-flow volatility and the effect of stock liquidity on firm dividend is weaker for firms reporting imputation tax credit.     

Explaining the default risk anomaly by the two-beta model

This study attempts to explain the anomaly that firms with high-default risk earn low average realized returns. We measure default risk according to Ohlson's (1980) O-score and Campbell, Hilscher, and Szilagyi's (2008) failure probability and further implement Duffie, Saita, and Wang's (2007) doubly-stochastic intensity model to estimate default probabilities that incorporate the dynamics of the changes in covariates. We then employ Campbell and Vuolteenaho's (2004) two-beta model to estimate firms' cash-flow and discount-rate betas according to the default risk. The default risk anomaly persists when using Duffie el al.'s (2007) method. We show that cash-flow and discount-rate betas, respectively, earn a high and low premium and find that high-default firms tend to have relatively high discount-rate and low cash-flow betas. Hence, high-default firms deliver low expected returns. Importantly, 25.5% of the default risk anomaly can be explained by the two-beta model and that, on average, also accounts for 49.2% of the cross-sectional variation across the portfolios formed on default risk. This result implies that investors believe that high-default firms are unlikely to generate significantly extra cash flows when market-wide profitable opportunities improve.     

What Drives Firm‐Level Stock Returns?

I use a vector autoregressive model (VAR) to decompose an individual firm's stock return into two components: changes in cash-flow expectations (i.e., cash-flow news) and changes in discount rates (i.e., expected-return news). The VAR yields three main results. First, firm-level stock returns are mainly driven by cash-flow news. For a typical stock, the variance of cash-flow news is more than twice that of expected-return news. Second, shocks to expected returns and cash flows are positively correlated for a typical small stock. Third, expected-return-news series are highly correlated across firms, while cash-flow news can largely be diversified away in aggregate portfolios.     

Payout policy and cash-flow uncertainty

The importance of cash-flow uncertainty in payout policy has received little attention in empirical studies, while survey studies such as [Lintner, J., 1956. Distribution of incomes of operations among dividends, retained earnings, and taxes. American Economic Review 46, 97–113.] and [Brav, A., Graham, J., Harvey C., Michaely, R., 2005. Payout policy in the 21st century. Journal of Financial Economics 77, 483–527.] indicate its importance. With worldwide firm-level data, we present evidence that cash-flow uncertainty is an important cross-sectional determinant of corporate payout policy. Our results show that across countries, cash-flow uncertainty, as proxied by stock return volatility, has a negative impact on the amount of dividends as well as the probability of paying dividends. The impact of cash-flow uncertainty on dividends is generally stronger than the impact of other potential determinants of payout policy—such as the earned/contributed capital mix, agency conflicts, and investment opportunities. We also find that the effect of cash-flow uncertainty on dividends is distinct from the effect of a firm's financial life-cycle stage.     

Dividend payout and executive compensation: theory and evidence from New Zealand

Using a model based on Bhattacharyya (2007), we predict a positive (negative) relationship between the earnings retention ratio (dividend payout ratio) and managerial compensation. We use tobit regression to analyse data for New Zealand firms' dividend payouts over the period 1997–2015 and find results consistent with Bhattacharyya (2007). These results hold when the definition of payout is modified to incorporate both common dividends and common share repurchases. Our results indicate that corporate dividend policy among New Zealand firms is perhaps best understood by considering the dividend payout ratio, rather than the level of, or changes in, cash dividends alone.     

Dual-class share structure on the dividend payout policy: Evidence from China Concepts Stocks

This study investigates the impact of the dual-class share structure on the dividend pay-out policy for China Concepts Stocks listed on the US stock exchanges. Using a unique and hand-collected dataset, we find that the dual-class share structure negatively affects the propensity to pay dividends and the dividend payout ratios. Among firms with dual-class share structures, the divergence between voting and cash-flow rights also negatively affects the propensity to pay dividends and the dividend payout ratios. Furthermore, these dual-class firms are more susceptible to the tunneling to controlling shareholders. Our findings highlight the potential cost of adopting dual-class share structures in China, and the importance of external monitoring for Chinese US-listed firms with dual-share structure.     

Institutional tax clienteles and payout policy

This paper employs heterogeneity in institutional shareholder tax characteristics to identify the relation between firm payout policy and tax incentives. Analysis of a panel of firms matched with the tax characteristics of the clients of their institutional shareholders indicates that “dividend-averse” institutions are significantly less likely to hold shares in firms with larger dividend payouts. This relation between the tax preferences of institutional shareholders and firm payout policy may reflect dividend-averse institutions gravitating towards low dividend paying firms or managers adapting their payout policies to the interests of their institutional shareholders. Evidence is provided that both effects are operative. Plausibly exogenous changes in payout policy result in shifting institutional ownership patterns. Similarly, exogenous changes in the tax cost of institutional investors receiving dividends results in changes in firm dividend policy.     

Firm uncertainty and corporate policies: The role of stock return skewness

We study the interaction between firm uncertainty and corporate policies, emphasizing the role of skewness in the distribution of performance shocks reflected in stock returns. Conditional on volatility and other characteristics, firms with more negatively skewed performance shocks adopt more conservative policies, including greater cash holdings, a lower likelihood of dividend payments and increases in payout levels, and less financial leverage. These relationships are significant and robust for asymmetry proxies constructed from stock return innovations, in contrast to results for measures based on accounting performance shocks. This disparity highlights the importance of asymmetries in long-run performance shocks for corporate policy choices.     

Taxes and dividend policy under alternative tax regimes

This paper examines changes in corporate dividend policy around the introduction of a dividend imputation tax system. This represented a significant change to the Australian tax framework and allows us to test the effect of differential taxation on corporate dividend policy. Consistent with the tax preference for the distribution of dividends, we find dividend initiations, all dividend payout measures and dividend reinvestment plans increased with the introduction of dividend imputation. Similarly we find that gross dividend payouts are more volatile under dividend imputation. Finally, we find that the increase in dividend payout and initiations differs across firms. In particular, we find that the higher the level of available franking tax credits the higher the firm's gross dividend payout and the more likely the firm is to initiate a dividend.     

Do dividends signal safety? Evidence from China

Our paper examines whether dividends convey information about future cash-flow volatility in the Chinese stock markets. We observe that dividend changes are followed by cash-flow-volatility changes in the opposite direction. Taking advantage of the unique context of China, we show, in both the two-way sorting analysis and the regression analysis, that the strong relation between changes in dividend and cash-flow volatility is robust after controlling for potential confounders, including firm-level financial market frictions, macroeconomic and market conditions, and government intervention in firms' decision-making, and holds after we control for endogeneity concerns. Furthermore, we perform the theoretic mechanism tests of the relation and present supporting evidence on the signaling theory under the setting of asymmetric information, instead of the free cash flow theory based on the assumption of agency conflict. This study enriches our understanding of the source and nature of cash-flow information contained in dividends.     

Payout Policy Tax Clienteles,Ex‐dividend Day Stock Prices and Trading Behavior in Germany: The Case of the 2001 Tax Reform

This paper examines the impact of the German 2001 tax reform, where Germany switched from a full imputation system to a classical system. Theory suggests that both price drop ratios and trading volume decrease following the reform. We document a significant reduction in the valuation of net dividends–in particular for high dividend yield stocks–and weakening payout policy tax clienteles. Ex‐dividend day returns are likely to be driven by short‐term traders. Though the reform removed incentives for cross‐border dividend stripping and reduced tax heterogeneity among investors, we show that the high trading volume around ex‐dividend days persists.     

Payout policy,taxes, and the relation between returns and the bid–ask spread

Recent evidence demonstrates that corporate payout policy has shifted from the nearly exclusive use of dividend payout to the inclusion of stock repurchase, primarily through open markets. This trend has been attributed to the tax advantages associated with repurchase relative to dividends. In this paper, we introduce personal taxation and stock repurchase to reexamine the relation between returns and the bid–ask spread. Our model provides insight into the nature of this relation. Tests performed using NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ data provide empirical support of our theoretical conclusions. We conclude that the firm’s choice of payout policy influences the relation between returns and spreads.     

Cash Flow News and Stock Price Dynamics

We develop a new approach to modeling dynamics in cash flows extracted from daily firm-level dividend announcements. We decompose daily cash flow news into a persistent component, jumps, and temporary shocks. Empirically, we find that the persistent cash flow component is a highly significant predictor of future growth in dividends and consumption. Using a log-linearized present value model, we show that news about the persistent dividend growth component predicts stock returns consistent with asset pricing constraints implied by this model. News about the daily dividend growth process also helps explain concurrent return volatility and the probability of jumps in stock returns.     

Stock returns,aggregate earnings surprises,and behavioral finance

We study the stock market's reaction to aggregate earnings news. Prior research shows that, for individual firms, stock prices react positively to earnings news but require several quarters to fully reflect the information in earnings. We find a substantially different pattern in aggregate data. First, returns are unrelated to past earnings, suggesting that prices neither underreact nor overreact to aggregate earnings news. Second, aggregate returns correlate negatively with concurrent earnings; over the last 30 years, for example, stock prices increased 5.7% in quarters with negative earnings growth and only 2.1% otherwise. This finding suggests that earnings and discount rates move together over time and provides new evidence that discount-rate shocks explain a significant fraction of aggregate stock returns.     

On the Importance of Measuring Payout Yield: Implications for Empirical Asset Pricing

We investigate the empirical implications of using various measures of payout yield rather than dividend yield for asset pricing models. We find statistically and economically significant predictability in the time series when payout (dividends plus repurchases) and net payout (dividends plus repurchases minus issuances) yields are used instead of the dividend yield. Similarly, we find that payout (net payout) yields contains information about the cross section of expected stock returns exceeding that of dividend yields, and that the high minus low payout yield portfolio is a priced factor.     

World dividends and tax shocks

For a sample of 28,895 firms across 30 countries and 29 years, there is a negative relation between dividend tax rates and dividend payout. Firms increase dividend payout in response to both absolute and relative (to capital gains tax rates) decreases in dividend tax rates. This negative relation is robust to both increases and decreases and both shocks and continuous variation in dividend tax rates and affects both dividend payer status and dividend payout level. However, dividend payers do not increase dividend payout levels following decreases in dividend tax rates. The negative relation between dividend tax rates and dividend payout is stronger in countries and firms with better governance and suggests a dividend taxation elasticity of −0.45.