Does Economic Policy Uncertainty Influence Firm Cash Dividend?

As the systemic risk of macro-economy,economic policy uncertainty has an important impact on micro-enterprises' behaviors.In particular,China is at the period of economic transition,frequent policy adjustments and severe government interventions all aggravate the instability of China's market economy environment,and then influence the companies' production activities and investment development decisions.Current literature on influence factors of company cash dividend most focuses on characteristics of company,and few scholars study the relationship between policy uncertainty and cash dividend payment.Thus,this paper uses the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index to measure economic policy uncertainty in China,and takes economic policy uncertainty as the start point to analyze whether this type of uncertainty could restrain cash dividend.Besides,this paper combines the contingency theory and the dividend life cycle theory to explore how economic policy uncertainty,firm growth,ownership influence on enterprise cash dividend.This paper chooses the annual financial data of A shares listed companies in non-financial industry from 2007 to 2016 as our research sample,and uses the method of panel data regression to carry on the empirical analysis,finally carries on the endogenous test and the robustness test.The following conclusions are drawn :(1)The higher the uncertainty of economic policy is,the less the companies' cash dividend will be;(2)Firm growth has a negatively moderating effect on the relationship of economic policy uncertainty and firm cash dividend;(3)Firm property has a negatively moderating effect on the relationship of economic policy uncertainty and firm cash dividend.Finally,this paper puts forward corresponding suggestions for government and corporate managers.