 Do dividends signal safety? Evidence from ChinaJing Nie and Libo Yin International Review of Financial Analysis, 2022, vol. 82, issue C Abstract: Our paper examines whether dividends convey information about future cash-flow volatility in the Chinese stock markets. We observe that dividend changes are followed by cash-flow-volatility changes in the opposite direction. Taking advantage of the unique context of China, we show, in both the two-way sorting analysis and the regression analysis, that the strong relation between changes in dividend and cash-flow volatility is robust after controlling for potential confounders, including firm-level financial market frictions, macroeconomic and market conditions, and government intervention in firms' decision-making, and holds after we control for endogeneity concerns. Furthermore, we perform the theoretic mechanism tests of the relation and present supporting evidence on the signaling theory under the setting of asymmetric information, instead of the free cash flow theory based on the assumption of agency conflict. This study enriches our understanding of the source and nature of cash-flow information contained in dividends. Keywords: Dividends; Signaling theory; Cash flow volatility; Chinese stock markets (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:finana:v:82:y:2022:i:c:s1057521922000916 DOI: 10.1016/j.irfa.2022.102123 Access Statistics for this article International Review of Financial Analysis is currently edited by B.M. Lucey More articles in International Review of Financial Analysis from Elsevier |
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