Intercorporate Ownership,Taxes, and Corporate Payout Choices*

This paper examines whether corporate payout choices (dividends or share repurchases) are associated with intercorporate ownership in a firm. Using the System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval (SEDAR) and the Inter‐Corporate Ownership (ICO) database from Statistics Canada, I find that intercorporate ownership is positively associated with a firm’s propensity to pay dividends and negatively associated with a firm’s propensity to repurchase shares. The findings are robust to the endogeneity of intercorporate ownership and the inclusion of various control variables such as firm size, risk, liquidity, growth, and profitability.