Study On The Relationship Between Listed Companies Shareholding Structure And The Dividend Policies

The thesis studied the relationship between cash dividends and stock ownership structure ofthe public companies and the changes after the reform the relationship has gone through with thehistory opportunity of non-tradable shares reform.The main reason keeping the research viewsfocused on this filed is that the non-tradable shares reform indeed shook capital market seriously.As a result, the property layout and management structure of the public companies has changedcompletely. Thus, the influence on the distribution level of cash dividends is obvious.Nonetheless, it remains to be further discussed how would the sudden change of the system beinternalized by market and then penetrate the management mechanism and financial decision ofpublic companies.From the main thought of the thesis, it mostly depended on the logic relationship amongownership structure, the agency problem and dividends policy to stretch the theory analysis andempirical test, so then to unscramble the function mechanism of ownership structure on cashdividends. First of all, we build a thinking framework on the theory illumination level. That is,how the ownership structure caused the agency problem and how agency problem decide thedirection of dividend distribution policy as well as treat the non-tradable shares reform as theturning point to describe the transition of the mechanism dynamically and periodically.Afterwards, we selected those corporations who had already gone public and had detailedhistorical information before2003to win the support of empirical data by regarding the returnslevel and measurement index of the stock ownership structure in multi-perspective asexplained and explanatory variables. Besides, the cross item between the virtual variable of stockreform and stock ownership structure has been set. Consequently, they helped to construct themultivariate linear regression equation to verify the theory assumption above.The thesis has been formed into following conclusions. Firstly, the non-tradable sharestructure of the public companies in China had a significant influence on its choice aboutdividend policy. On the other hand, agency problem was the key to conclude the relation. Withthe intertexture of conflicts of various benefits, the existence patterns of agency problem iscomplicated. Secondly, ownership concentration system, ownership restriction level and thefeatures and characters of dominant shareholders would affect the formulation of dividend policy,in which companies will allocate more cash dividends if the ownership is more concentrated.Power of restriction and supervision though the balanced structure had, it made no difference.The dominant shareholders had the motivation to tunnel the public companies by using cashdividends. For those who held state-owned shares shareholders, they didn’t have that muchstrong desires than those who held other sorts of shares. Thirdly, non-tradable share reformactually played a paramount role in enhancing company management and remodeling the formation mechanism of dividend policy. It not only weakened the tunneling of dominantshareholders, but also increased the discourse power of other investors in the decision of profitsdistribution.The research of this thesis contributed to help us recognizing the relationship betweennon-tradable shares structure and cash dividends from the view of agency problem. And itconduce to point the direction for improving the management structure of public companies, andoptimizing financial decisions. What’s more, some constructive suggestions were proposed forthe actual enforcement of the government regulatory functions and ensuring the rights ofmedium and small investors.