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The stylized facts that firms pay and investors react to dividends disregard dividend neutrality. Taking on the perspective that informational asymmetries are the central determinant for dividend value relevance, Christian Müller assumes that firm’s dividend decision conveys useful information to investors. He shows that investors use dividend changes to revise their a priori expectations about the persistence of a current earnings change. While his theoretical and empirical analyses generally imply that dividend changes constitute informative, but imperfect information signals, he further identifies situations in which they are substantial to investors. Christian Müller’s research comprehensively examines the informational role of dividend policy and provides new insights to the corresponding Bayesian investor learning process.
The dividend policy is one of the most debated topics in the finance literature. According to the dividend signalling hypothesis, which has motivated a significant amount of theoretical and empirical research, dividend change announcements trigger share returns because they convey information about management's assessment on firms' future prospects. Consequently, a dividend increase (decrease) should be followed by an improvement (reduction) in a firm's value. Although there are empirical evidence supporting the positive relationship between dividend change announcements and the subsequent share price reactions, some studies have not supported this idea. Furthermore, several studies found evidence of a significant percentage of cases where share prices reactions are opposite to the dividend changes direction, like the works of Asquith and Mullins (1983), Benesh, Keown and Pinkerton (1984), Born, Mozer and Officer (1988), Dhillon and Johnson (1994) Healy, Hathorn and Kirch (1997), and, more recently, Vieira (2005). We introduce a new approach to investigate the relationship between the market reaction to dividend changes and future earnings changes with the purpose of understanding why the market sometimes reacts negatively (positively) to dividend increases (decreases). We find only weak evidence for the dividend information content hypothesis. The Portuguese results suggest that the adverse market reaction to dividend change announcements is basically due to the fact that the market does not understand the signal given by firms though dividend change announcements. Moreover, we find no evidence of the inverse signalling effect, except for the UK market. The results suggest that the UK market investors have more capability to predict future earnings than the investors of the Portuguese and the French markets.
We present fresh evidence on the validity of the dividend signaling hypothesis (DSH), by using a new testing approach. We test the unambiguous prediction from the DSH that the association between current dividend changes and future profitability is stronger for firms with higher marginal net benefits from signaling. Using a simple dividend signaling model, we derive three empirically identifiable drivers of the marginal net benefit of signaling: cash flow predictability, market-to-book, and past equity returns. Our empirical tests support the DSH. There is a significant association between current dividend changes and future earnings performance for firms with low cash flow predictability, low market-to-book ratio, and low past equity returns. But, as predicted by the DSH, the association is much weaker for firms with high cash flow predictability, high book-to-market, and high past equity returns. There is also evidence that the marginal signaling benefits at the firm-level are influenced by aggregate factors: the information content of dividend changes is time-varying, increasing (decreasing) in booms (recessions) and in periods of high (low) aggregate stock market performance.
Previous empirical research has established that dividend changes are associated with significant abnormal returns. This association is rationalized on the basis that the dividend announcement acts as a signal of future earnings. Another body of research has documented the existence of intra-industry transfers of information where news about one firm is extrapolated to other companies in the same industry. Earnings information transfers have been found to be positive in nature with good news about one company leading to stock price increases for rival firms. Linking dividend signaling and information transfer, tests were constructed to ascertain whether the dividend change of one firm is associated with the stock price performance of other companies in the same industry. The results indicate there is some small positive information transfer. The magnitude of information transfer is related to the degree of the dividend surprise, the recent dividend history of the other companies, and correlations in stock returns between the dividend announcer and the other companies. Information transfer is found to affect earnings and earnings growth estimates of the other firms and this leads to revisions in their stock prices.
The stylized facts that firms pay and investors react to dividends disregard dividend neutrality. Taking on the perspective that informational asymmetries are the central determinant for dividend value relevance, Christian Müller assumes that firm’s dividend decision conveys useful information to investors. He shows that investors use dividend changes to revise their a priori expectations about the persistence of a current earnings change. While his theoretical and empirical analyses generally imply that dividend changes constitute informative, but imperfect information signals, he further identifies situations in which they are substantial to investors. Christian Müller’s research comprehensively examines the informational role of dividend policy and provides new insights to the corresponding Bayesian investor learning process.
This study complements existing research on the information content of dividends by focusing on the use of dividend expectations. We derive a measure of unexpected dividend changes, called dividend surprises, based on Value Line forecasts. Our results highlight a potentially serious sample misclassification arising from the extensively used naive dividend change method. Classifications of unexpected changes in dividends using dividend surprises result in stock price reactions and earnings changes that are consistent with the implications of dividend signaling models. Also, the approach followed in this paper permits the analysis of a significantly quot;forgottenquot; sample in previous event studies: Firms announcing no dividend changes in which investors (analysts) are expecting a change. We find that no change in dividends often reflects a negative dividend surprise and is indeed associated with negative stock price reaction and negative earnings changes. We provide evidence that the failure to find a relationship between dividend changes and future earning changes may be due to measurement error arising from misclassification of dividend changes. One implication of this study for future research is that empirical tests of dividend signaling models should incorporate dividend forecasts.
One of the most important predictions of the dividend-signaling hypothesis is that dividend changes are positively correlated with future changes in profitability and earnings. Contrary to this prediction, we show that after controlling for the well-known non-linear patterns in the behavior of earnings, dividend changes contain no information about future earnings changes. We also show that dividend changes are negatively correlated with future changes in profitability (return on assets). Finally, we investigate the out-of-sample forecasting ability of dividend changes. We find that models that include dividend changes do not outperform those that do not include dividend changes. In fact, our evidence indicates that investors are better off not using dividend changes in their earnings forecasting models.