Dividends and politics

Steven Bank, Brian Cheffins and Marc Goergen

European Journal of Political Economy, 2009, vol. 25, issue 2, 208-224

Abstract: This paper contributes to a growing literature on politics and corporate governance by providing an empirical analysis of the impact of political factors on dividend payouts. The focus is on the determinants of dividend policy in U.K. public companies between 1949 and 2002. We augment Lintner's [Lintner, J., 1956. Distribution of incomes of corporations among dividends, retained earnings, and taxes. American Economic Review 46, 97-113.] partial adjustment model by including measures of politics and test the model using aggregate annual dividends and earnings data. We find neither the political placement of the party in power nor regulations explicitly designed to regulate corporate behaviour correlate in the direction political theories of corporate governance would predict.

Keywords: Corporate; governance; Dividend; policy; Politics; Tax; rules; Dividend; controls (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0176-2680(09)00004-4
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:25:y:2009:i:2:p:208-224

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung

More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().