Ex‐Dividend Profitability and Institutional Trading Skill

We use institutional trading data to examine whether skilled institutions exploit positive abnormal ex‐dividend returns. Results show that institutions concentrate trading around certain ex‐dates, and earn higher profits around these events. Dividend capture trades represent 6% of all institutional buy trades but contribute 15% of overall abnormal returns. Institutional dividend capture trading is persistent. Institutional ex‐day profitability is also strongly cross‐sectionally related to trade execution skill. The relation between execution skill and profits disappears around placebo non‐ex‐days. Results suggest that skilled institutions target certain opportunities rather than benefiting uniformly over time. Furthermore, only skilled institutions can profit from dividend capture.     

Dividend Announcements and Changes in Beta

This study examines changes in beta risk around dividend announcement dates. The evidence shows that beta changes are strongly influenced by the changing behavior of large and small betas. This implies that researchers who attribute risk changes to specific announcements may need to control their research design for regression order bias. Further research may also be needed to ascertain whether or not this regression order bias plays a significant role in the estimation of abnormal returns in event studies.     

Dilution,Dividend Commitments and Liquidity: Do Dividend Changes Reflect Information Signaling?

We develop new tests of the dividend signaling hypothesis by focusing on the role of liquidity. We allow for two different types of signaling models: one where current dividends signal firm value and the objective is to prevent current dilution, and the other where commitments to future dividends constitute the signal. We find that the results differ by the sign of the dividend surprise. Signaling models of the commitment type explain the market reaction to negative dividend surprises. Interestingly, this result is significant only for the earlier sub-period in our sample due, perhaps, to the well-documented increase in institutional investors with longer horizons. The market reaction to positive dividend surprises, on the other hand, is shown to be consistent with the over-investment and wealth transfer hypotheses. We show that the failure of the signaling model for these firms could be due to lower costs of dividend increases.     

The Differential Persistence of Accruals and Cash Flows for Future Operating Income versus Future Profitability

Prior research provides evidence that a higher proportion of accrued relative to cash earnings is associated with lower earnings performance in the subsequent fiscal year. The result has been widely interpreted as indicative of higher levels of operating accruals relative to cash flows foreshadowing a subsequent earnings reversal, and thus signaling earnings management. We note, however, that earnings performance in prior studies is typically defined as one-year-ahead operating income divided by one-year-ahead invested capital, or a measure of profitability. We find that accruals are more highly associated than cash flows with invested capital in the denominator of the profitability measure. In contrast, accruals and cash flows have no differential relation to one-year-ahead operating income. The evidence is not consistent with accruals having a reversal effect on earnings. This suggests that the lower persistence of accruals versus cash flows may not be due to earnings management but may rather be due to the effect of growth on future profitability.     

税收变化与上市公司股利政策选择

本文通过在回归方程中引入反映税率政策变化的虚拟变量,主要分析了2006年前后上市公司的股利政策是否随税率变化做出调整。实证结果显示,中国上市公司股利政策行为与经典财务理论相悖,表明上市公司缺乏回报股东的责任意识,股东利益并不是影响他们股利政策的主要因素。研究还发现,在研究期内融资成本的下降趋势对提高上市公司股利派发水平有正面影响,而投资机会和上市公司短期偿债能力对上市公司股利政策的影响并不显著。     

Regular Dividend Announcements and Future Unexpected Earnings: An Empirical Analysis

Previous studies have interpreted stock price reaction to dividend announcements as being consistent with the hypothesis that any changes are forecasts of future corporate profits. Recent studies seem to provide evidence to this effect. This study provides additional empirical evidence pertaining to the issue of whether quarterly cash dividend announcements convey useful information about a firm's future profitability, beyond that contained in contemporaneous quarterly earnings announcements. The association between unexpected changes in quarterly dividends and unexpected accounting earnings in subsequent quarters is examined, after controlling for information contained in past and current earnings series. The results, based on a large sample of regular quarterly cash dividend changes, indicate that firms that increased (decreased) their dividends realized, on average, greater (smaller) unexpected accounting earnings in subsequent periods than firms that did not change their dividends.     

Prior Information and the Market Reaction to Dividend Changes

We investigate two hypotheses regarding the information content of dividend change announcements. The first is that the importance of information signaled by a dividend change depends on the reliability of earnings forecasts existing before the dividend announcement. The second hypothesis is that the stock price reaction to dividend change announcements is related to earnings forecast error as of the time of the dividend announcement. Our results reveal that dividend increases convey more information for firms in which financial analysts least accurately predict earnings. The results also indicate that dividend increase and decrease announcements provide market participants with information which, on average, allows them to differentiate between firms on the basis of future earnings realizations. These differential information effects are shown to be robust to price, size, dividend yield, and overinvestment effects.     

Inventory Changes and Future Returns

We find that the negative relation between accruals and future abnormal returns documented by Sloan (1996) is due mainly to inventory changes. We propose three explanations for this result, derived from the prior literature, but find evidence inconsistent with all three explanations. To assist future investigations in formulating additional explanations, we document several empirical regularities for extreme inventory change deciles. We speculate that demand shifts explain our results, and examine the feasibility of alternative reasons for the stock market's apparent inability to recognize the impending profitability reversals. Our evidence is consistent with earnings management masking the implications of demand shifts.     

Adjustment to Future Dividend Rates in the Prediction of Ex-rights Prices

This paper seeks to expand upon an aspect of rights issues investigated by Merrett, Howe and Newbould in Equity Issues and the London Capital Market, of the prediction of the ex-rights price. It is suggested on the basis of an Australian sample that the London results are sustained, but that varying the assumptions made we are able to extend our knowledge of the adjustment of share prices to the new information which becomes available in relation to rights issues. This study supports the opinion that the market is comparatively efficient in its assessment of ex-rights prices.     

The Market's Differential Reactions to Forward-Looking and Backward-Looking Dividend Changes

Empirical evidence on the signaling hypothesis of dividends is weak and mixed. Recent studies find that dividend changes reflect mostly current and past earnings but not future earnings. We provide a model in which not all dividend changes contain new information about future earnings. Some dividend decisions are backward looking (noninformation or nonsignaling events). Other dividend decisions are forward looking (information or signaling events). The model helps identify the two types of dividend changes and predicts that the market will respond strongly only to forward‐looking dividend changes. We provide evidence consistent with the implications of the model.     

Using Asset Turnover and Profit Margin to Forecast Changes in Profitability

Financial statement analysis textbooks advocate disaggregating profitability into asset turnover and profit margin in performing financial analysis. In spite of the prominence of this technique, there is no evidence demonstrating its usefulness in a forecasting context. We provide evidence that disaggregating return on assets into asset turnover and profit margin does not provide incremental information for forecasting the change in return on assets one year ahead, but that disaggregating the change in return on assets into the change in asset turnover and the change in profit margin is useful in forecasting the change in return on assets one year ahead.     

Stock Price Adjustment to the Information in Dividend Changes

This paper examines abnormal stock returns in the three years surrounding relatively large changes in dividends announced during the 1971 to 1990 period. The main results are that statistically and economically significant negative post-announcement abnormal returns of 11% and 17% over the post-announcement year are found for firms which decrease dividends and those which omit their dividends. Firms resuming and firms increasing dividends do not exhibit significant abnormal returns, on average, over the post-announcement year. The pattern of lagged price adjustment to negative dividend change information differs from that reported for 'earnings surprise' firms in important respects. While the dividend change firms do exhibit returns behavior consistent with year-to-year returns momentum, differences in prior year returns do not explain the differences in returns over the post-announcement period.     

Discussion of “The Differential Persistence of Accruals and Cash Flows for Future Operating Income versus Future Profitability”

Fairfield et al. (2003a, this issue) suggests that the accrual effect in Sloan (1996) is at least partly due to the fact that accruals signify an increase in (less-productive) net operating assets. Thus, the paper is a useful and thought-provoking reminder that accruals have both earnings and balance sheet effects. However, the impact of the empirical results is diminished by the lack of a convincing story that ties and grounds these results to other knowledge in the area.     

REIT Splits and Dividend Changes: Tests of Signaling and Information Substitutability

Recent work on stock splits have attempted to relate the information value associated with splits with that from dividends signaling. This paper extends this genre of research by evaluating the issue of dividend predictability using REIT data where the self-selection issue associated with dividend payment is minimized. The use of REIT data also eliminates the “differential expectations” effect for non-dividend paying firms, thus rendering a more robust test of the information substitutability hypothesis postulated by Nayak and Prabhala (2001). To the extent that stock splits are signals of future cash flows, we further examine the question of leverage predictability associated with REIT splits, particularly for highly levered firms. We find that REITs that use dividend changes as a signaling mechanism prior to splits have smaller price responses to the private information revealed by splits than those that do not provide such signals, consistent with the notion that dividends and splits are indeed information substitutes. Further, REIT splits provide useful information about future dividend and leverage changes.     

Implications of Components of Income Excluded from Pro Forma Earnings for Future Profitability and Equity Valuation

Abstract:  This study addresses three research questions relating to total exclusions, special items, and other exclusions. Are each of these pro forma exclusion components forecasting irrelevant? Are each of the exclusion components value irrelevant? Are the valuation multiples on the exclusion components justified by their ability to forecast future profitability as predicted by the Ohlson (1999) model? Findings are generally consistent with the market-inefficiency results presented in Doyle et al. (2003) . Total exclusions are valued negatively by the market despite the prediction that total exclusions will be valued positively. Valuation results also suggest that stocks with positive other exclusions are overpriced.     

Dividend Dynamics and the Term Structure of Dividend Strips

Many leading asset pricing models are specified so that the term structure of dividend volatility is either flat or upward sloping. These models predict that the term structures of expected returns and volatilities on dividend strips (i.e., claims to dividends paid over a prespecified interval) are also upward sloping. However, the empirical evidence suggests otherwise. This discrepancy can be reconciled if these models replace their proposed dividend dynamics with processes that generate stationary leverage ratios. Under such policies, shareholders are forced to divest (invest) when leverage is low (high), which shifts risk from long‐ to short‐horizon dividend strips.     

Regulatory Monitoring and the Impact of Bank Holding Company Dividend Changes on Equity Returns

This paper examines the impact of announcements of dividend changes by bank holding companies (BHCs) on equity returns. Many empirical studies of dividend behavior reveal positive market responses to dividend increases, which have been interpreted as confirmation of the signalling theory of dividend behavior. These studies typically focus on “large” changes, however. We argue that BHCs allow for a stronger test of signalling theory because regulatory monitors, in effect, “certify” dividend signals. Consequently, even “small” dividend increases should result in positive abnormal equity returns. Using the event study methodology, our results generally confirm this hypothesis for a sample covering the period 1973–1987.     

Changes to Income Trust Taxation in Canada: Investor Reaction and Dividend Clientele Theory

Abstract:  This paper explores the relationship between tax-induced dividend clientele theory and the recent changes to the taxation of income trusts in Canada. On October 31, 2006, the Canadian government announced the Tax Fairness Plan ( TFP ) calling for the elimination of the considerable tax advantage enjoyed by income trusts. Generally, distributions from income trusts are now taxed at rates comparable to those imposed on corporate dividends. We examine market reaction to the  TFP  to address three issues: first, whether the valuation effect of a dividend tax increase is consistent with the traditional or the new view of dividend taxation; secondly, whether the market reaction to tax increases has a differential impact on firm value that is related to the tax preferences of taxable, tax-exempt, and foreign investor tax clienteles; and thirdly, whether firms change their dividend policies in response to the preference of institutional investors (tax-based dividend policy effect) or whether institutional investors are sorting themselves across firms based on their dividend policies (investor sorting effect). Our results provide strong evidence as follows. First, the valuation effect in reaction to the  TFP  announcement is consistent with the traditional view of dividend taxation – i.e. that taxes on dividends reduce the net return to investors, increase the firm's cost of capital and lower the firm's ability to access capital markets, thereby discouraging investment and savings. Secondly, we saw that trusts with a larger percentage of their units held by tax-exempt, low-tax, and foreign investors had a higher decline in value when compared with trusts held mostly by ordinary taxable investors. These results support dividend tax clientele theory. Finally, we observed changes in institutional investor clienteles consistent with the investor sorting effect.     

Does the Pricing of Financial Reporting Quality Change Around Dividend Changes?

We examine whether accrual earnings quality is a priced information risk factor in a dividend change setting. We define information risk as the probability that firm‐specific financial statement information pertinent to investor pricing decisions is of low precision, and use the factor‐mimicking portfolio returns formed on the Dechow‐Dichev [2002] accrual quality (AQ) metric to proxy for the information risk (IR) factor returns. We augment the Fama‐French three‐factor model with this IR factor, and find that dividend initiation and increase firms exhibit a decrease in the factor loadings on the IR factor while dividend decrease firms exhibit an increase in the corresponding factor loadings, but such changes in the factor loadings occur months prior to the dividend change announcements. The results are robust to further controls for operating risk and using an alternative measure of information risk. Further analysis on changes in information characteristics such as AQ, the probability of informed trading score (PIN), forecast dispersion, and return volatility surrounding dividend change events are consistent with the asset pricing results. Overall, we interpret our results as being consistent with investors treating the information risk associated with the precision of financial statement information as a priced risk factor, with both the precision and pricing changing in predictable directions around dividend changes. However, while we attempt to control for operating risk changes in additional tests, we cannot completely rule out changes in operating risk as a competing alternative explanation for our observed results.