Taxes, clientele effect of dividend and risk, return linearity

This paper extends the equivalence relationship between risk/return linearity and portfolio efficiency as derived in Roll (1977) to the case where there is differential taxation affecting investors optimal portfolio choice. Following the formulation of Brennan (1970a), the fundamental linearity relationship is derived which raises serious doubts to the testability of the extendedCAPM that accounts for the effect of differential taxation. Finally by aggregating other imperfections as well as differential taxation into a dividend yield constraint, a different version of theCAPM is derived which offers alternative interpretations of the existing empirical results on the subject.     

The effects of ownership structure on dividend policy: Evidence from seasoned equity offerings (SEOs)

This paper examines the effects of ownership structure on dividend policy, specifically the role of controlling shareholders in shaping dividend policy in a sample of firms that pay dividends and issue new equity simultaneously. The results show that managers in weakly governed firms are more likely to initiate customized dividends to meet outside large shareholders' needs while simultaneously using costly external capital to finance new investment projects. This paper contributes to the existing literature on agency problems by explaining why firms engage in this suboptimal dividend policy: it allows large shareholders to extract private benefits.     

Ownership structure and dividend policy: Evidence from Italian firms

Abstract

This paper reports on empirical investigations into the relationship between dividend policy and ownership structure of firms, using a sample of 139 listed Italian companies. Ownership structure in Italy is highly concentrated and hence the relevant agency problem to analyse seems to be the one that arises from the conflicting interests of large shareholders and minority shareholders. This paper therefore attempts to test the rent extraction hypothesis by relating the firm’s dividend payout ratio to various ownership variables, which measure the degree of concentration in terms of the voting rights of large shareholders. The hypothesis that other non-controlling large shareholders may have incentives to monitor the largest shareholder is also tested. The results of the empirical analysis reveal that firms make lower dividend payouts as the voting rights of the largest shareholder increase. Results also suggest that the presence of agreements among large shareholders might explain the limited monitoring power of other ‘strong’ non-controlling shareholders.     

Does common ownership constrain managerial rent extraction? Evidence from insider trading profitability

This study identifies a new economic benefit of common institutional ownership, which refers to the increasingly contentious phenomenon of U.S. firms sharing stockholders with their industry competitors. We find a significantly negative relation between common ownership and insider trading profitability. The disciplinary effect of common ownership on opportunistic insider trading is particularly evident when the information effects of common ownership are greater, when common owners are more likely to benefit from positive governance externalities, and in the subset of trades made by opportunistic insiders. Using the exogenous variations in common ownership induced by financial institution mergers, we conduct a difference-in-differences analysis and find consistent results. We also provide evidence that common owners encourage firms to impose ex-ante restrictions on insider trading and take ex-post actions to discipline opportunistic insiders by voting against management. Overall, our findings suggest that common institutional shareholders have information advantages, governance incentives, and effective means to constrain opportunistic insider trading.     

The effects of trading rights and ownership structures on the informativeness of accounting earnings: Evidence from China’ split share structure reform

This paper examines how the removal of trading restrictions and ownership structures affect earnings informativeness by investigating the changes in the earnings-return relation around China’s split share structure reform. I find the reform has a negative impact on the relationship between controlling shareholders’ ownership and earnings informativeness, which is consistent with the idea that the removal of trading restrictions gives controlling shareholders incentives to influence the stock price through managing earnings. I also find that earnings informativeness decreases with the reduction in controlling shareholders’ ownership. This dilution effect is more significant for firms with non-state controlling shareholders or with controlling shareholders that are not monitored by other large shareholders. The results are consistent with the notion that controlling shareholders provide less informative earnings in response to the dilution of their ownership to avoid the constraints arising from the increased monitoring by outside investors.     

Taxes,transactions costs and the clientele effect of dividends

This paper is an empirical investigation into the extent to which transactions costs and taxes influence individual investors' portfolios. Using actual portfolio and demoraphic data made available by the Individual Investor Research Project at Purdue University, this study finds evidence of a significant dividend clientele effect. Reasonable proxy variables used to measure time preferences and tax rates in part explain the cross sectional variability of investors' portfolio dividend yields. The variables that are most important in influencing the individual's dividend decision are age, and a measure of the investor's differential tax rate on dividends and capital gains.     

Carbon risk and dividend policy: Evidence from China

Using a large sample of Chinese listed industrial firms from 2009 to 2019, this study investigates the effect of firm-level carbon risk on dividend policy. We find that carbon risk has a significant and negative impact on a firm's dividend payout level. We also find that when firms' capability in innovation is stronger, the degree of earnings uncertainty is higher, a firm belongs to high‑carbon industries, the negative relationship between carbon risk and dividend payout level is more significant. Furthermore, financial constraints and cash holdings are two underlying channels through which carbon risk affects cash dividend payouts. Our findings remain consistent across several robustness checks.     

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.     

The effects of ownership structure,sub-optimal cash holdings and investment inefficiency on dividend policy: evidence from Indonesia

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - We investigate how a firm’s decision to hold excessive cash or to overinvest could influence its dividend payout policy in Indonesia....     

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.     

Taxes and Financial Constraints: Evidence from Linguistic Cues

Using a new measure of financial constraints based on firms’ qualitative disclosures, we find that financially constrained firms—firms that use more negative words in their annual reports—pursue more aggressive tax planning strategies as evidenced by: (1) higher current and future unrecognized tax benefits, (2) lower short‐ and long‐run current and future effective tax rates, (3) increase in tax haven usage for their material operations, and (4) higher proposed audit adjustments from the Internal Revenue Service. We exploit the unexpected closures of local banks as exogenous liquidity shocks to show that firms’ external financial constraints affect their tax avoidance strategies. Overall, the linguistic cues in firms’ qualitative disclosures provide incremental information beyond traditional accounting variables or commonly used effective tax rates to reveal and predict tax aggressiveness, both contemporaneously and in the future.     

Dividends,Taxes, and Signaling: Evidence from Germany

The higher taxation of dividends in the United States gave rise to theories that explain why companies pay dividends. Tax-based signaling models propose that the higher tax on dividends is a necessary condition to make them informative about companies' values. In Germany, where dividends are not tax-disadvantaged and in fact are taxed lower for most investor classes, these models predict that dividends are not informative. However, we find that the stock price reaction to dividend news in Germany is similar to that found in the United States. This suggests other reasons, beyond taxation, that make dividends informative.     

Institutional ownership and monitoring: Evidence from financial misreporting

We find that the likelihood and severity of financial misreporting is positively related to aggregate institutional ownership and this effect can be largely attributed to ownership by institutions with short investment horizons — those with little incentive to engage in costly monitoring of firm activities and precisely those that sell at the announcement of a restatement. We also find that the concentration of holdings by these institutions offsets this effect, which suggests concentrated ownership induces greater monitoring and mitigates the incentives for firms to misreport. Our results suggest that any link between myopic firm decision making and institutional ownership may be related to the nature of institutional monitoring.     

State ownership and stock liquidity: Evidence from privatization

We provide unique firm-level evidence of the relation between state ownership and stock liquidity. Using a broad sample of newly privatized firms (NPFs) from 53 countries over the period 1994–2014, our study identifies a non-monotonic association between state ownership and stock liquidity. The inverse U-shaped relation is consistent with trade-offs between costs and benefits of state ownership and suggests an optimal level of government shareholdings that maximizes stock liquidity of NPFs. We further identify that the inflection point from the cost/benefit trade-off is contingent upon characteristics of the nation's institutional environment.     

Leverage and Taxes: Evidence from the Real Estate Industry

Finance theory has long viewed corporate income taxes as a potentially important determinant of corporate financing decisions and capital structures. But finance academics have been unable to provide convincing empirical evidence of a material effect of taxes on corporate leverage, in part because of difficulties in constructing an effective proxy for marginal corporate tax rates, and hence for the tax benefits of debt, for large samples of individual companies. The authors address this by analyzing leverage decisions in an industry whose publicly traded entities are organized either as taxable corporations, or as real estate investment trusts (REITs) that effectively avoid entity level taxation. This enables them to measure the relative tax benefits of debt with greater precision while controlling for important nontax characteristics that affect debt usage. The tax hypothesis predicts that for real estate firms with similar asset portfolios, taxable firms should have more debt than their nontaxable counterparts. Both the nontaxable and the taxable real estate firms in our sample routinely have more than twice the leverage of industrial firms, which suggests that factors other than taxes are contributing to their use of debt. But among real estate firms, tax status appears to play a much weaker role. Taxable firms have significantly more leverage only after 2000, when restrictions on REITs were removed through new regulations that made their operations much more like those of taxable real estate firms. Our findings also depend on real estate characteristics—most notably, only residential real estate firms demonstrated differences that are consistent with the tax hypothesis. Taken together, the authors’ findings suggest that although taxes do seem to matter, their role is clearly secondary relative to factors such as the nature of the firm’s assets. A generous interpretation of our evidence puts the effect of taxes between one‐third and one‐half of that implied by prior research.     

Algorithmic trading and block ownership initiation: An information perspective

This paper examines the impact of algorithmic trading (AT) on investors' incentives to initiate block ownership in U.S. public companies. We find that a one standard deviation change in AT activity reduces the block ownership initiation likelihood by 3.5%. Using the SEC's randomised tick size pilot experiment in 2016 as a negative shock to AT, we show that the effect of AT on block ownership initiation is causal. Further evidence supports the information-hindering explanation that AT discourages sophisticated investors from acquiring information, which results in a decrease in block ownership initiation. We find that the effect of AT is more pronounced among information-sensitive investors and that institutional investors reduce their information-gathering activities in AT-targeted stocks. Additional tests exploring information-based trading behaviour in the presence of AT provide strong evidence to support the explanation of information-hindering, and our results hold across a battery of robustness tests.     

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.     

Common ownership and executive pay-for-performance sensitivity: Evidence from China

This study focuses on the impact of common ownership on executive pay-for-performance sensitivity using a sample of A-share listed firms in China from 2008 to 2020. We find common ownership significantly improves executive pay-for-performance sensitivity and plays a monitoring and governance role. Meanwhile, the impact of common ownership on executive pay-for-performance sensitivity is more significant in non-state-owned firms (non-SOEs) and when a firm faces a highly competitive product market. The mechanism tests indicate that common ownership affects executive pay-for-performance sensitivity through the information and governance mechanisms. Further analyses show that the portion of compensation explained by common ownership significantly enhances future firm performance. Overall, our findings validate the positive role of common ownership in corporate governance.     

Taxes and Corporate Policies: Evidence from a Quasi Natural Experiment

We document important interactions between tax incentives and corporate policies using a “quasi natural experiment” provided by a surprise announcement that imposed corporate taxes on a group of Canadian publicly traded firms. The announcement caused a dramatic decrease in value. Prospective tax shields partially offset the losses, adding 4.6% to firm value on average, and vary with the tax status of the marginal investor. Further, firms adjust leverage, payout, cash holdings, and investment in response to changing tax incentives. Overall, the event study and time series evidence supports the view that taxes are important for corporate decision making.     

Managerial ownership and firm performance: Evidence from China's privatizations

We examine the relationship between managerial ownership and firm performance for a sample of Chinese State-owned enterprises (SOEs) privatized over the period 1992-2000. The results indicate that managerial ownership has a positive effect on firm performance. Although return on assets (ROA) and return on sales (ROS) decline post-privatization, firms with high managerial ownership and, specially, high CEO ownership, exhibit a smaller performance decline. The difference is highly significant, with or without controlling for residual state ownership and changes in the firm's operating environment. We also find that the influence on firm performance becomes less significant at higher levels of CEO ownership. In contrast, performance continues to increase with managerial ownership. This finding suggests that, beyond a certain point, the distribution of shares would be more effective if extended to the whole management team instead of being limited to the chief executive.