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This chapter introduces dividend policy as both financial and business decisions. First, it presents the history of dividend payment, definition of dividend, and typical types of dividend. Dividends originate from liquidating payments of sailing vessels in the early 16th century and become popular with the development of corporations. In this book, a dividend is defined as a cash payment to shareholders. By payment time, there are three typical types of dividend including final dividend, interim dividend, and special dividend. Second, it presents definition, important dates, measures, and patterns of dividend policy. Dividend policy includes two decisions: the first is to pay or not to pay dividends, and the second is the dividend magnitude. Investors have to follow important dates of dividend payments in order to make their investment decisions. Important dates include declaration date, record date, ex-dividend date, and payment date. Dividend payout ratio and dividend yield are two common measures of dividend policy. Common patterns of dividend policy are no dividend policy, residual dividend policy, stable dividend policy, and irregular dividend policy. Finally, dividend policy is both financial and business-related decisions. Therefore, dividend decisions are affected by various levels of business environment such as internal, micro (industry), and macro-environment. Dividend theories are the behind mechanisms to explain the effect of each factor in the business environment on corporate dividend policy. Dividend policy, in turn, determines shareholders' wealth through its impact on stock price.

Today’s financial reporting inherits its origin in money, numbers and accounting dated back 7,000 years in Mesopotamia. The Italian Luca Pacioli, “first person to publish a work on double-entry bookkeeping”¹ is regarded as the father of accounting and bookkeeping. In USA, SEC issued its first Accounting Series Release which appeared to be Commission’s views on auditing and accounting, later, in 1982 has become known as Financial Reporting Releases. Today more than 100 countries permit publicly held companies to use International Financial Reporting Standards. This meteoric rise for use of financial reporting was due to a worldwide demand from regulators, lenders, trade partners, businesses, investors and policy makers. “The Companies Act of 1994 mandates requirement for financial reporting by all companies in Bangladesh.”² Banks’ reporting formats and disclosures in Bangladesh based on BAS 30 is similar to the requirements of the Companies Act of 1994. The research depicts how the two banking institutions of Bangladesh – Islami Bank Bangladesh Limited (IBBL) and Grameen Bank having two philosophical objectives – uniquely present their results of operation under a uniform financial reporting system and how they differ in their financial operations.

Transnational migration has produced a state of flux in the naturalized conception of home as a fixed, bounded, discreet and trouble-free place of origin, (re)casting home as a more complex, or perhaps simpler, project entangled within the workings of the global capitalist economy. In this context, here the author qualitatively explores migrants’ engagement with the notion of home in the sense of how they conceptualize and experience home, based on the lived experiences of Sri Lankan women who have migrated to Kuwait as live-in migrant domestic workers (MDWs) independently of their families. The stories of the MDWs simultaneously made the meaning of home as conventionally defined, more straightforward and more complicated: home was taken on a journey with them to a faraway foreign land. The MDWs negotiated and constructed belonging and not belonging dialectically in multiple homes, thus being simultaneously “here,” “there” and “nowhere.” In migration, home thus manifests the evolution of female power and duty, portraying it at once as a locus of women’s liberation and as new and perhaps more extreme forms of (re)subjectivation in the emplacement of home within global capitalism. Migration performs home as a space in the (un)making: an ongoing project through the course of life.