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Considering that the heterogeneity in the composition of deliberation and management bodies can promote a differentiated impact on earnings distribution policies of companies, the purpose of this paper is to examine the marginal influence of female participation on the board of directors and executive board regarding decisions associated with dividend policy in companies operating in Brazil.

The sample is composed of non-financial companies listed on the B3 Stock Exchange between 2010 and 2015, which encompasses 261 companies (1,084 observations per year). The tests aim at explaining the probability of earnings distribution and the payout level of companies through variables that measure the female presence – considering that the explanatory economic attributes of decisions over dividends are kept under control. The econometric analysis was carried out through the descriptive analysis of the variables and LOGIT and TOBIT tests of inference estimated with fixed effects and meeting all econometric requirements.

The proportion of women in both deliberative and executive bodies affects marginally the dividend policy of Brazilian companies. The female presence in management bodies contributes to a higher probability of earnings distribution and increase in the payout level; such tendency is moderated when women are in the board of directors; so, we do not reject the hypothesis of female influence on dividend policy decisions in Brazil.

One can find such investigations in foreign environments, but such tests had not been accomplished in Brazil so far. We discuss, therefore, in an unprecedented way, the heterogeneity in deliberative (governance) and executive (management) bodies and its outcomes in strategic decisions made in Brazilian companies, focusing on the female insertion and on fundamental decisions that are related to the relationship among stakeholders, which is the dividend policy per se.

This paper examines whether ownership type has a moderating influence on dividend payouts during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis with respect to changes in profits. Future uncertainties because of the pandemic will result in a perceived need for liquidity within the company, but retaining cash may be risky for shareholders who could look for less risky alternatives. The dividend payout strategy is thus even more closely related to the overall type concentration and strategy of the owners during the crisis.

The effects are explored and tested on early data from 2019 to 2020 of Finnish companies using ANCOVA while controlling for profitability and sector variables.

A significant effect on dividend payout during the COVID crisis was found when the companies are dominantly held by individual owners validating early suggestions on such an influence. Therefore, this study contributes further to the academic debates on the influence of ownership concentration in times of crises. This study lists certain sectors which experience diminished profits during such a crisis which pinpoints sector separation in future discussions.

This study explores early data from a specific context in the Nordic countries. However, it does so out of purpose as explained in the paper.

Ownership type and concentration matters when it comes to dividend payout decisions under uncertainty with regard to changes in profit. Investors need to accept these behavioural insights into their decisions.

This study examines the signalling effect of dividends by analysing how actual or anticipated change in profitability due to a crisis is reflected by owners and leads to dividend payout decisions under uncertainty.

The purpose of this paper is to observe whether the entrenchment of managers can affect firms’ dividend disbursement decisions and investor sentiment in the Tunisia context.

The sample includes all non-financial listed stocks in the Tunisia stock exchange during the years 2004–2017. Moreover, the entrenchment of managers is measured by five proxy explained the managers rooting from all listed firms. The propensity to pay dividends is measured by the dividend yield.

The findings yield qualitatively consistent with the previous research. After controlling for the effect of a manager’s behavior and different entrenchment phase, the result shows that entrepreneurial the firm’s decision to pay dividends could be influenced by the managers’ entrenchment.

The result is limited at the level of the non-financial companies listed in the BVMT, but in future studies, the investigation with other countries can be compared.

Moreover, investors in Tunisia show their preference for a dividend to self-control and satisfaction and increase their profit, especially in an abnormal economic situation explained by the Tunisian political crisis.

The originality of this paper is to investigate both the important role of the entrenchment and cycle life of the manager on the decision to distribute dividends and the investor sentiment. Moreover, the author’s problem may be a reference for future investigation talking about the managers’ psychology like opportunism.

This study will examine the impact of cash dividends on the market value of banks listed in Middle East and North African (MENA) emerging countries during the period 2000–2015.

The current study adopts residual income approach based on Ohlson's (1995) valuation model. By testing different statistical techniques, fixed effect is applied on panel data for (144) banks listed on 11 MENA stock markets over the period 2000–2015. Furthermore, additional tests are applied to confirm the primary results.

The analysis reveals that current dividend payouts and dividend yield do not provide information relevant to the establishment of market values in MENA emerging markets; thus, they have no material impact on MENA banks' market values. This lack of current dividend payment effect is consistent with Miller and Modigliani (1961) dividend irrelevance assumption: there is no evidence of either an informational or real cash inflow effect of current dividend payments. The findings of this study can be attributed to the fact that MENA banks may be forced to place more emphasis on allocating money for investment instead of paying dividends given them they are subject to liquidity requirements for investment, expansion, general operations and compliance with regulations. Only after all these financial needs are covered can the remaining surplus be distributed as cash dividends. Therefore, cash dividends represent earnings residual rather than an active decision variable that impacts a firm's market value. This is consistent with the residual dividend hypothesis, which is the crux of Miller and Modigliani (1996) irrelevance theory of dividends.

The current study is restricted to a sample of one type of financial firms, banks, because of the problem of missing data and limited information related to other financial firms for the same period. Therefore, further research could be additional types of financial firms such as insurance firms that play a vital role in MENA emerging economies.

The results of this study have some important implications for banks' dividend policymakers. Dividend policymakers in MENA emerging markets seem to follow residual dividend policy, in which they distribute dividends according to what is left over after all acceptable investment opportunities have been undertaken. This makes for inconsistent and unstable dividend policy trends, making it difficult for investors to predict future dividend decisions. Further, this practice may deliver information to shareholders about a lack of positive future investment opportunities, and this may negatively affect the share value of banks.

This study is the first of its kind – up to the author's knowledge – that examines a large cross-country sample of MENA banks (144) to cover a long time period in the recent past, and, more importantly, after the banking sector in the region has experienced major transformations during last two decades. In addition, most of the MENA region countries included in this study, namely, banks, operate in tax-free environments (there are neither taxes on dividends nor on capital gains). This feature adds complexity to the ongoing dividend debate.

The authors measure the cost of equity to earnings yield differential for a sample of 2,035 non-financial firms. In a series of Logit and Tobit regressions, the authors examine if the cost of equity to earnings yield differential is related to dividend policy in the manner predicted by agency theory.

Agency theory says a firm's optimal dividend policy is partially determined by the relationship between the earnings yield and the cost of equity capital. When the cost of equity is higher (lower) than the earnings yield, firms are motivated to (not) pay dividends as this reduces the cost of capital and holding other things constant, increases corporate valuations. The authors test whether managers set dividend policies to maximize the value of the firm.

The study’s findings show that when the cost of equity is higher (lower) than earnings yield, firms are more (less) likely to be dividend payers and the payouts are higher (lower). The results are robust to the inclusion of share repurchases as an alternative to cash distributions. The study’s findings support the cost of equity hypothesis and are consistent with alternative dividend theories.

The study’s findings support the cost of equity hypothesis and are consistent with alternative dividend theories. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper testing the cost of equity hypothesis.

Debt, dividend and investment policy constitutes a company's important financial decisions to determine firm performance. The research emphasizes on the problem of overinvestment, a phenomenon that worsens firm operation. Furthermore, it clarifies the moderation role of debt and dividend policy in mitigating the negative effect of overinvestment on firm performance in the case of Vietnamese listed companies.

The research uses all financial statement of non-financial Vietnamese listed companies on Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi Stock Exchange in the period of 2008–2018. The data are collected from Thomson Reuters Eikon. The final data set is comprised of 669 listed companies. The study measures overinvestment though investment demand function and HP filter. Moreover, the research employs the dynamic model, so it has to apply the SGMM method to deal with the problem of endogeneity caused by the lagged dependent variable.

The research finds that overinvestment is negatively associated with firm performance. Debt or dividend policy separately can moderate the negative effect of overinvestment on firm performance. However, when these two policies are combined, they lessen the positive interaction impact of each policy due to the substitution between debt and dividend policy.

The research may have two limitations. Firstly, the research measures overinvestment indirectly through investment demand function and HP filter. These two measures only help identify the sign that companies may have the problem of overinvestment because we cannot determine whether they overinvest or not in reality. Secondly, when using interaction variables, the problem of multicollinearity may be higher, and this may adjust the signs and significance level of variables in the models.

Practically, the research proposes three policy recommendations. Firstly, a company can exploit debt or dividend policy to limit excessive free cash flow in order to constrain the problem of overinvestment. Secondly, a company should enhance its corporate governance to resolve agency problems. Thirdly, the government should make the financial sector more transparent and effective to improve monitoring functions of various parties in the capital market.

Overinvestment sometimes can cause social issues. Overinvestment means that companies make ineffective investment. If they continue this situation over a long time, companies may have financial distress or even go bankruptcy. As a result, it will slow down economic growth and increase unemployment in the economy.

The research is supposed to make two great contributions to the existing empirical studies in two aspects. Firstly, it is the first attempt to take into consideration the interaction between overinvestment and financial policies. Secondly, it helps enhance the fundamental stance of the agency theory, which supports the interdependence of debt, dividend and investment policy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between dividend policy and earnings quality of Vietnamese listed firms.

The sample includes firms listed on Vietnam stock exchange during the period between 2010 and 2016. Two measures of earnings quality are the annual firm-specific absolute value of residuals from Dechow and Dichev’s (2002) model and from Dechow and Dichev (2002) as modified by McNichols’s (2002) model. The firms’ dividend policy is captured by dividend paying status. This is a dummy variable that takes the value of 1 if the firm pays dividends and 0 otherwise. In addition, dividend yield and dividend payout ratio, which are continuous variables, are also used in this paper as alternative proxies for dividend policy.

Using panel data analysis, this paper documents that dividend payers have higher earnings quality than dividend non-payers. Dividends are an indicator of earnings quality. These findings are consistent with prior studies. After controlling for variables that may be related to earnings quality as well as for the year and industry fixed effects, this relation remains unchanged. In addition, this result is also robust after controlling for firm fixed effects.

This paper offers the empirical evidence on the relation between dividend policy and earnings quality in Vietnam, which is a frontier market.

This study aims to analyze the influence of taxes and corporate governance on the dividend policy of Brazilian companies.

The authors identify the changes of the tax legislation in Brazil in the period 1986-2011 and check their effect on corporate dividend policies for preferred and common shares. The authors use panel data Probit and Tobit estimation to verify the probability of companies to pay dividends under different tax regimes. The final sample comprises 672 companies, 1,159 traded stocks and 30,134 observations

The authors’ results suggest that changes in the tax legislation have a significant influence on dividend payments. Also, firms do not follow target payout ratios, but dividends are moderately dependent on past payments. Dividend payouts are affected by stock voting rights, privatization and dividend deductibility. Changes in regulation that reduce the agency problems among shareholders affect positively payout ratios.

For managers, maximizing shareholders’ value requires taking into account the consequences of the taxation when designing financial policies for the firm. For investors, stock portfolio selection should take into account payout behavior and how changes in dividend taxation affect stocks’ value. For policymakers, the effects of changes in the tax code on corporate behavior are of utmost importance to stimulate private investment and economic growth.

There are several tax law changes in Brazil within the period analyzed, creating a good opportunity to study the effect of taxation on dividend policy and its dynamics over time.

This paper aims to examine the interdependence of financial decisions (investment, financing, dividends and cash-holding) under financial constraints.

The authors specify and estimate a system of simultaneous equations with panel data and firm fixed effects by three-stage least squares in a sample of firms from 62 countries from 1996 to 2010.

The main findings largely corroborate previous studies regarding the interdependence of financial decisions. The authors also find evidence suggesting that financial constraints have a major impact on firms’ financial decisions. The results also suggest that financial constraints manifest themselves in virtually all firms, indicating that such constraints are a matter of degree and not of kind.

Implications regarding the impact of cash flows on investment and cash-holding decisions are only partially confirmed.

The results are consistent with the hypothesis that financial constraints distort the financial policies of firms. For the purpose of formulating policies that reduce these distortions, the authors emphasize the role of the availability of internal funds and the recoverable fraction of assets in easing financial constraints, thus allowing for greater investment on the part of firms.

The results suggest that regulators should promote policies that reduce the dependence of corporate investment on internally generated cash flows.

Unlike previous studies, the authors account for the direct impact endogenous variables could have on each other. In addition, they explore the impact of each country’s particular legal environment on the pledgeability of assets at the company level.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the current capital budgeting practices in Bangladeshi listed companies and provide a normative framework (guidelines) for practitioners.

Data were collected with a structured questionnaire survey taking from the chief financial officers (CFOs) of companies listed in the Dhaka Stock Exchange in Bangladesh. Garnered data were then analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistical techniques.

The results found that net present value was the most prevalent capital budgeting method, followed closely by internal rate of return and payback period. Similarly, the weighted average cost of capital was found to be the widely used method for calculating cost of capital. Further, results also revealed that CFOs adjust their risk factor using discount rate.

The findings of this study might help the firms, policymakers and practitioners to take a wise decision while evaluating investment projects. Additionally, this study’s findings enrich the existing body of knowledge in the field of capital budgeting practices by providing more reliable and comprehensive analysis taking samples from a developing economy.