餐饮股利理论外文翻译.docVIP

外文翻译 原文 A Catering Theory of Dividends Material Source:The journal of finance Author:Malcolm baker and Jeffrey wurgler Miller and Modigiliani(1961) prove that dividend policy is irrelevant to share value in perfect and efficient capital markets. In that setup, no rational investor has a preference between dividends and capital gains. Arbitrage ensures that dividend policy is irrelevant. Forty-plus years later, the only assumption in this proof that has not been thoroughly scrutinized is market efficiency.In this paper, we argue for a view of dividends that relaxes this assumption. It has three basic ingredients. First,for either psychological or institutional reasons, some investors have an uninformed and perhaps time-varying demand for dividend-paying stocks. Second,arbitrage fails to prevent this demand from driving apart the prices of payers and nonpayers. Third, managers rationally cater to investor demand—they pay dividends when investors put higher prices on payers, and they do not pay when investors prefer nonpayers. We formalize this catering view of dividends in a simple model. The prediction of the model that we focus on in our empirical work is that the propensity to pay dividends depends on a dividend premium (or sometimes discount) in stock prices. To test this hypothesis, we use time-variation in four proxies for this dividend premium. The broadest one, which we simply call “the”dividend premium, is the difference between the average market-to-book ratio of dividend payers and nonpayers. The other measures are the difference in the prices of Citizens Utilities’ (CU) cash dividend and stock dividend share classes (between 1956 and 1989 CU had two classes of shares which differed in the form but not the level of their payouts); the average announcement effect of recent dividend initiations; and the difference between the future stock returns of payers and nonpayers. Intuition suggests that the dividend premium, the CU dividend premium, and initiation e