| In the process of development over more than 20 years,Chinese stock market has gradually evolved into a catalyst that can promote rapid economic development.However,due to the immaturity of relevant legal regime and the imperfection of the governance system of listed companies,the investment views of public have been distorted,information asymmetry and agency conflict are prominent,and the stock market has become a tool of policy and money encirclement.There are many chaotic phenomena while distributing dividends,which have triggered analysis and discussion of many market participants and scholars.The cash dividend policy is a hot spot in the field of capital market research and corporate finance.International and domestic academics have derived rich dividend theories and hypotheses by integrating dividend study with other economic theories.In recent years,the enrichment and development of capital market microstructure theory provide a different perspective for exploring the influenc ing factors of listed companies' cash dividend policy.At the same time,the outbreak of the liquidity crisis in 2015 made stock investors deeply aware that the assumptio n of perfect market in the dividend irrelevance theory is not realistically established,and the importance of liquidity to financial assets and even the capital market is selfevident.In order to taking stock liquidity into account when analyzing firm cash dividend policy,we do the theoretical analysis first from perspectives of the manager's behavioral psychology,information environment,agency conflicts and Chinese market characteristics.Furthermore,based on the empirical analysis using a sample of 2338 Chinese A-share listed companies over the period of 2003-2016 for a total of 20239 firm-year observations,we systematically explore the impact of stock liquidity on the cash dividends payment strength and wil ingness of listed companies,which has significant enlightenments for stock market investors,listed companies and securities market regulators.The theoretical and empirical results indicate that with other conditio ns unchanged,companies with more liquid stocks are more likely to pay cash dividends and the payout ratios of these firms are higher too.In order to al eviate the contingency bias caused by the selection of liquidity indicators and the endogenous problems caused by the missing explanatory variables,we conduct the robustness test by changing the liquidity index,depicting the characteristics of liquidity from three different dimensions,and adopt the fixed effect regression model to control the time-invariant variables of the company-level that may be missed,and we found that our conclusion still holds.In order to further investigate the impact mechanis m of stock liquidity on cash dividend payment,we incorporated the company's information environment and agency issues into our analytical framework.Through regression analysis,we found that among companies with more opaque informa t io n environment or with more serious agency conflicts,stock liquidity has a stronger influence on the cash dividend payment policy,indicating that the information effect brought by stock liquidity reduces the information asymmetry between internal and external,increases the cost of insiders' self-interested behaviors and al eviates the company's two types of agency problems,thus urging the company to enhance the distribution strength and wil ingness of cash dividends.Subsequently,we discuss the influence of the share-trading reform,and found that the dividend payout ratio after the share reform is significantly reduced,and the share-trading reform weakens the positive correlation between stock liquidity and cash dividends.Finally,based on the study,we proposes appropriate ideas and policy recommendations to investors,listed companies and market regulators. |
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