The Empirical Study Of The Large Shareholders' Impact On Cash Dividend Policy In Chinese Listed Companies

Dividend policy is the decision by which a listed company allocates its earnings, which is an important financial activity. Corporate financing and shareholders'investment returns are both related to dividend policy.At the beginning of the Chinese stock market coming into existence, it was designed to serve those state enterprises. To maintain the main body of the public ownership, all the state enterprises listed in the market are still controlled by the State. Convergence of ownership could partly prevent the shareholders'benefits from inner tunneling, however, it also results in large shareholders'tunneling.So, the paper proposes the hypothesis that cash dividend policy is influenced by the control structure and shareholders'preference. Whether and how to distribute dividend, depend on the power and the game of different shareholders. In this game, more powerful one in control structure wins dominance of corporate decision-making.Firstly, this paper backdates the dividend theories skeleton, and analyzes the research actualities about the topic of the control structure and the dividend policy. Afterward, on the basis of data statistics, we present the particularity of stock structure, control structure and cash dividend policy in our country. To analyze how the control structure affects on the dividend policy, the paper uses Banzhaf index to value the control power of large shareholders, adding variables of shareholders'types, industries variables and variables of government policies to regression model. Furthermore, by defining the two situations of complete control and non-complete control, we respectively study the stock structure's influence on the cash dividend level by using statistics and quantile regression model.Results are as follows: First, the first and second largest shareholders'control did take significant effect on cash dividend policy. Second, state shareholders and shareholders in the employee union prefer cash dividend, while foreign shareholders relatively wouldn't like to do so. Other types of shareholders didn't take any effect. Third, when company was completely controlled by the largest shareholder, his impact on dividend policy rose along with quantile index of dividend. While, when the largest shareholder comparatively controlled the company, on one could take any effect.