Study On Dividend Payment Change And Influencing Factors

The company's dividend Policy has been a hot topic in financial study for forty years. To decode this Conundrum, researchers have done plenty of work to analyze the dividend of listed companies and they have raised many theories to explain the reason why companies pay dividend by cash. Agency theory is one of the most mature ones. First, this paper reviewed the literatures about dividend policy and the ones on dividend tax. Though the relative literature is rich, they did not get an identical conclusion. And few study the effects of dividend tax to the company'dividend policy or how the tax influence the stockholder s', the board of director's and the managers' behaviors through the principal-agent mechanism.This paper used a principal-agency model containing dividend tax to analyze the behaviors of stockholders, managers and board of directors, and then analyze the dividend policy and the situation of dividend. Based on the opportunity that China cut off half of the dividend tax in 2005,I select the stocks in stock-A market in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchange as subjects to compare the situations before and after the change of dividend tax. And I use the data of profitability and dividend of the listed companies to describe the statistical analysis. Further, I analyze other factors that affect the dividend. We have drawn the following conclusions:Overall, the size of dividend tax obviously influences the cash dividend of the listed companies. It is to say, tax effect of dividend policies exists. The introduction of dividend tax affects the investors'real income and the managers'earning, thereby affecting the dividend policy. Reducing the dividend tax could boost the listed companies to allocate cash dividends. The data show that some companies tend to allocate profit and the amount of the dividend of the whole market increases in the first accounting year after the variation of the dividend tax. The dividend tax stimulates the companies whose shares are held by the institutional investors like fund companies to allocate profit and their dividend payout ratio increases obviously. The empirical results show that the dividend per share and the average dividend payout ratio of those MBO companies whose managers hold plenty of shares also have an obvious upgrade in 2005.In addition, scholars are facing an Integral and complicated market which involves plenty of factors while studying the dividend policy. Many noises can affect the stockholders', board of directors'and managers'decisions, and furthermore affect the company's dividend policy and react in the function of dividend tax. Meanwhile, China's stock market is a new market which is shocked a lot by kinds of policies. Therefore, further study is required because there are many factors that may affect the allocation of cash dividend.