The Driving Factors Of And The Market Response To China Listed Companies' Interim Cash Dividends

This paper statistically analyze the interim cash dividends distribution events of listed companies in China from December 1990 to December 2014.Based on that discontinuous interim cash dividends of non-financial listed companies from Shanghai stock exchange and Shenzhen stock exchange during 2007 to 2014 have been selected,and impact factors on whether companies would distribute interim cash dividend have been empirically analyzed,sampling with the discontinuous interim cash dividends as well as the data of their matching companies on industry and asset size.The empirical analysis results show that profitability,the growth rate,the ownership concentration,and the annual cash dividend distributed last year have significant impacts on a company's choice of whether to distribute interim cash dividend.Meanwhile,the empirical analysis also demonstrate that factors making impact on interim cash dividend levels are mainly capital structure,profitability,cash adequacy,ownership concentration,the growth rate,and annual cash dividend last year,as well as the proportion of the accumulated cash dividend.Defining the days when proposal of interim cash dividends are announced as event days and event windows as from six days before to eleven days after the event days,we calculate the cumulative excess return.The empirical results show that the market respond positively to the interim cash dividends,which means it seems to be a preference to the market.