Research On The Relationship Between Ownership Structure?board Independence And Cash Dividend Policy

With the popularization and development of modern corporate system in the world,the issue of corporate governance has always been the focus of scholars,and the search for the optimal solution of corporate governance structure is the goal of all people.As part of the corporate governance,cash dividend policy also received special attention,in the modern company two rights separation caused by agency problems existing in the background,the investors return on an investment company does not seem to be so "natural",scholars have done a lot of work about the relationship between the agency problem and the cash dividend policy,but the results are not consistent.The “alternative model” considers that the more serious the agency problem is,the company needs to pay more cash dividend to maintain its reputation and attract more investors,The “consequence model" holds that a company with better corporate governance will pay more cash dividends to shareholders.However,it has not been generally accepted that which model is more applicable in China.This paper will further discuss from a new perspective.Under the background of mixed ownership in China,the existence of state-owned holding enterprises and the problem of equity division in the process of economic transformation make China's equity structure more concentrated compared with foreign countries,and the phenomenon of "one share is dominant" is more prominent,so the second type of agency problem between controlling shareholders and minority shareholders will be more obvious,Therefore,it is of great significance to discuss the relationship between the ownership structure and the cash dividend policy for the government to issue relevant policies and measures to regulate listed companies and maintain the healthy and long-term development of China's capital market.On the other hand,the independent director system has been in operation for a certain time in China,and its positive role in optimizing corporate governance has been confirmed in many relevant studies.However,the independent director's role is not independent of other governance mechanisms,and the formulation and introduction of cash dividend policy are interspersed between the general meeting of shareholders and the board of directors and subject to the competition and influence of various forces,so the independent director system is bound to be implicated with other governance mechanisms and thus affect the cash dividend policy.Therefore,it is of more practical significance to clarify the relationship between the multiple governance mechanisms and the cash dividend policy and the mutual influence between the governance mechanisms.This paper tries to put the equity structure,board independence and cash dividend policy under the same framework to discuss the relationship between the equity structure and cash dividend policy and the moderating effect of board independence on the relationship between them.Firstly,this paper clarifies the background and significance of the research,expounds the contribution of the research,and then cuts into the thesis.Then it reviews the basic theories and literatures related to this research.Based on the relationship between ownership structure and cash dividend policy and the moderating effect of board independence on this relationship,three hypotheses are proposed in this paper.In order to verify the hypothesis,this paper takes the companies listed on the main board of Shanghai and shenzhen stock markets of China as the research object,and collects their financial data from 2012 to 2017 as the research sample.Measure the cash dividend policy from the two aspects of payment intention and payment degree,logit model was used to verify the relationship between ownership structure and distribution intention,tobit model was used to verify the relationship between ownership structure and distribution degree,and the moderating effect of board independence on the above two relations.Statistical software like excel2016,spss19.0 and stata14.0 were used for empirical analysis.The final results show that: when the shareholding ratio of the controlling shareholder is low,the payment level of cash dividends increases with the increase of the shareholding ratio of the controlling shareholder;When the shareholding ratio of the controlling shareholder continues to rise to a certain extent,the payment level of cash dividends decreases with the continuous increase of the shareholding ratio of the controlling shareholder.Equity checks and balances can replace cash dividends as a means to reduce the second type of agency costs,that is,there is a negative correlation between equity checks and balances and cash dividend policies;Board independence can also replace cash dividends as a means to reduce agency costs,and it strengthens the relationship between equity checks and balances and cash dividends.The results of this paper prove that the substitution model is more applicable in China.This paper confirms that there are interactions among various corporate governance mechanisms.When examining the efficiency of a corporate governance mechanism,we should not only see the role of the mechanism itself,but also comprehensively consider the influence of other governance mechanisms.The reality is often more complex than the theory,so the theory should be more comprehensive.At the end of the paper,three Suggestions are put forward,they are to strengthen the supervision of cash dividend policy,optimize the existing shareholding structure in China and improve the independent director system.In addition,this paper makes innovations in two aspects: firstly,it studies the latest data after adopting the reform of non-tradable shares for a certain period of time,so the effect of non-tradable shares reform has been shown,which avoids the influence of non-tradable shares on the research conclusion and makes the research situation closer to reality;Secondly,on the basis of analyzing the relationship between ownership structure and cash dividend policy,the moderator variable of board independence is added to discuss the relationship among the three,while no scholars have studied the situation of the three at the same time before.