The Empirical Analysis Of The Relationship Between The Ownership Structure And The Dividend Policy Of Listed Company

Dividend policy plays an important role in corporation financial management. It is essentially the result of unceasing negotiations between different interest parties by cooperation and competition. Meanwhile, the ownership structure is the main factor which can decide the competitive strength of each party, and therefore cash dividend policy will be affected by the feature of the ownership structure consequently. The non-tradable share reform which brought great changes to the ownership structure is a tremendous event in our capital market. In the upcoming full-circulation era, studying the influence of the ownership structure changing on the dividend policy making has significant meaning.This paper uses the Chinese listed Companies as the sample and compares the cash dividends policy between the pre-reform era and the post-reform era from the aspects of distribution desire and distribution level to examine how the non-tradable share reform affects the cash dividends distribution behavior of Chinese listed companies.With the development of the domestic capital market and the introduction of the empirical method from western countries, domestic scholars paid attention to the research of the dividend policy. They mainly examined whether the signalling theory and agency theory applied in domestic listed companies. They also tried to find the factors that affecting the dividend policy. The research was difficult in the beginning due to the lack of the amount of listed companies and the deficiency of the research tools. Recently, with the increasing number of the listed companies and the usage of the database, the research on the dividend policy climbed to a new level.The empirical study of the relationship between equity structure and cash dividends policy shows that under the equity split state, the controlling shareholders and the state-owned shareholders have strong preference for cash dividends. After the reform, both in the cash dividends distribution desire and distribution level, this strong preference has dropped significantly.The results of the empirical analysis also reveal that the proportion of the tradable shares is negatively related to cash dividend per share, namely, the greater the proportion of tradable shares,the lower the amount of cash dividends.The empirical study of the relationship between the degree of equity balance and cash dividends policy indicates that under the equity split state, the balance equity structure with several large shareholders is helpful to curb the tunnel behavior through cash dividends policy of majority shareholders. After the reform, the relationship is positive and the degree of equity balance is still at a low level, the balance equity structure has not yet fully formed.This paper also points out some new problems that China’s stock market may be faced in the course of development after the equity splitting reform. In the last part, countermeasures and suggestions are proposed in a bid to help the managers of listed companies make appropriate dividend policy and promote the development of the stock market.