Study On The Influence Of Board Characteristic On Cash Dividend Policy

Dividend policy is an important element of company activities in management, and also the research field of financial management problem, so dividend policy is reasonable or not will have a direct impact on the company’s operational efficiency and value. Different companies have different dividend policies; studies have shown that, there are many factors affecting the dividend policy, which not only from the macro level social and economic environment, but also from the micro level of company management, including the board of directors. The board of directors is the decision-making body of the company management, to responsible for the company’s annual profit distribution plan. So, whether the internal characteristics of board of directors can effectively play the role of board governance mechanism, further affecting the cash dividend policy of the company? What features will prompt companies to make more cash dividend, and what features will reduce the willingness and the listing corporation level of cash dividend if this influence exists? This paper attempts to answer these questions.This paper uses the method of combining normative research and empirical research, research on the relationship between board characteristics and cash dividend policy. In this paper, the characteristics of board of directors including the constitute characteristics, structural characteristics, motivation characteristics, behavior characteristics, stable characteristics, network characteristics from six aspects, and respectively use board size, number of independent directors, the board of directors of monetary compensation, the frequency of board meetings, leadership structure, board of directors and the board of directors to measure the stability index of network the proportion of seven indicators. Firstly, this paper systematically comb and summarize the domestic and foreign existing research on dividend policy influence factor and the relationship between board characteristics and cash dividend policy; secondly based on the control theory to analyze the relationship between board characteristics and cash dividend agency theory and internal client. This paper refers to the characteristics of the board of directors including board size, number of independent directors, the board of directors of monetary compensation, the frequency of board meetings, the board leadership structure, stability and network. In the part of empirical research, this paper selects two A shares listing Corporation of Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchange in2008-2013as the research sample, and manually collect the change of directors and chain board data. This paper analyze the board of directors of the seven types of features on the effect of cash dividend distribution of the company and distribution level the integrated by the "Logisitc model"、"Probit model" and "Fixed effect model", so as to provide some useful reference to the level of cash dividend policy optimization from the board of directors. Finally, based on the research results, on how to optimize the board governance structure, improve the governance effect of the board of directors to improve aspects of dividend policy suggestions and prospect the future research direction.This study found that:(1) the board of directors is positively related to the willingness of the cash dividend distribution scale, the number of independent directors, board of monetary compensation and company, and the frequency of board meetings, leadership structure and corporate cash dividend will negatively related, in addition, the stability and the network of the board of directors is higher, the company more willing to distribute cash dividend;(2) the number of independent directors, the board of directors, the board of directors of monetary compensation level of cash dividend distribution and stability of network and the company was significantly positive correlation, and the size of the board of directors, the board of directors is negatively related to the number of times the conference, the leadership structure and corporate cash dividend level. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a new perspective for research of the interpretation of listed corporation’s dividend payout behavior through a more comprehensive measure of board characteristics, and analyzes its influence on the willingness of the cash dividend distribution of listing corporation and level, at the same time, also provides new empirical evidence on governance and dividend policy aspect of the directors in this paper. Research of this paper shows that the board of directors is one of the important factors to affect the cash dividend policy of China’s listing companies.