The investment opportunities available to the firm constitute an important component of market value. The investment opportunity set of a firm affects the way the firm is viewed by managers, owners, investors, and creditors ([43] Caliper and Tremble, 2001). The literature has given considerable attention in recent years to examining the association between investment opportunity set and corporate policy choices, including financing, dividend, and compensation policies ([59] Smith and Watts, 1992; [29] Giver and Giver, 1993; [41] Caliper and Tremble, 1999; [40] Jones and Sharma, 2001; [1] Abbott, 2001). According to [40] Jones (2001), investment opportunity set represents a firm's investment or growth options but to [51] Myers (1977) its value depends on the discretional expenditures of managers. [51] Myers (1977) further explains investment opportunity as a yet-to-be realized potentially profitable project that a firm can exploit for economic rents. Thus, this represents the component of the firm's value resulting from options to make future investments ([59] Smith and Watts, 1992).
Growth opportunities are also represented by the relative fraction of firm value that is accounted for by assets in place (plant, equipment, and other tangible assets), and that the lower the fraction of firm value represented by assets in place, the higher the growth opportunities ([32] Gull and Kelley, 1999). [43] Caliper and Tremble (2001) suggest that, the conventional notion of investment opportunity set is of new capital expenditure made to introduce a new product or expand production of an existing product. This may include an option to make expenditure to reduce costs during a corporate restructuring. An investment opportunity has been measured in various ways by various writers. These include market to book value of equity ([21] Collins and Kithara, 1989; [20] Chung and Charoenwong, 1991), book to market value of assets ([59] Smith and Watts, 1992), and Tobin's q ([58] Skinner, 1993).
Existing literature suggests a relationship between investment opportunities and dividend policy. [59] Smith and Watts (1992) argue that firms with high investment opportunity set are likely to pursue a low dividend payout policy, since dividends and investment represent competing potential uses of a firm's cash resources ([29] Giver
and Giver, 1993). [40] Jones (2001), extending and modifying the work of [29] Giver and Gaver (1993), found out that high growth firms were associated with significantly lower dividend yields. [32] Gul and Kealey (1999) also found a negative relationship between growth options and dividends. [1] Abbott (2001) argues that firms that experienced an investment opportunity set expansion (decrease) generally reduced (increase) their dividend payout policy. Others support the fact that firms with higher market-to-book value tend to have good investment opportunities, and would retain more funds to finance such investment, thus recording lower dividend payout ratios ([56] Rozeff, 1982; [44] Lloyd et al. , 1985; [22] Collins et al. , 1996; [4] Amidu and Abor, 2006). [55] Riahi-Belkaoui and Picur (2001) also validated the fact that firms in high investment opportunity set group are \opportunity set are \yield valued\This implies that for firms in low investment opportunity set, dividends are of greater relevance than earnings whilst the opposite is true for firms in high investment opportunity set. Using market-to-book ratio as proxy for investment opportunity set, [6] Aivazian and Booth (2003), however, found a positive relationship between market-to-book value ratio and dividend payments, suggesting that firms with higher investment opportunities rather pay higher dividends.
2.2 Corporate finance and dividend payout
The financing choice of firms is perhaps the most researched area in finance in the past decades following the seminal article of [50] Modigliani and Miller (1958) raising the issue of the relationship between a firms choice of finance and its value. Recently, there are still increasing research and new evidence being sought for the relevance or otherwise of the theory started by Modigliani and Miller. The theorem hinges on the principle of perfect capital markets. This asserts that firm value is completely independent of how its productive assets are financed. Subsequent researches have suggested a relationship between choice of financing and firm value even though some researchers corroborated the findings of Modigliani and Miller's irrelevance theory ([26] Fama, 1974; [54] Pruitt and Gitman, 1991). However, studies
by [5] Anderson (1983), [53] Peterson and Benesh (1983) have proved that in the \world\market imperfections effectively prohibit the independence of firm's investment and financing decisions. This market imperfection is primarily coming from the fact that there are taxes, transaction cost, information asymmetry, and bankruptcy cost. This indicates a relationship between the choice of financing and firm value.
Financial leverage is said to play an important role in reducing agency costs arising from shareholder-manager conflict and is believed to play a vital role of monitoring managers ([39] Jensen and Meckling, 1976; [37] Jensen, 1986; [60] Stulz, 1988). [28] Farinha (2003) contends that debt is likely to influence dividend decisions because of debt covenants and related restrictions that may be imposed by debtholders. Also, firms with high financial leverage and implied financial risk tend to avoid paying high dividends, so they can accommodate risk associated with the use of debt finance. [56] Rozeff (1982), [25] Easterbrook (1984) and [22] Collins et al. (1996) extending the agency theory observe that firms pay dividend and raise capital simultaneously. In the view of [25] Easterbrook (1984), increasing dividends raises the probability that additional capital will have to be raised externally on a periodic basis. This view is also shared by [31] Green et al. (1993) who argue that dividend payout levels are not totally decided after a firm's financing has been made. [35] Higgins (1972) suggests that firms' dividend payout ratio could be negatively influenced by their need for finance. Thus, dividend decision is taken alongside financing decisions. [36] Higgins (1981) shows a direct link between growth and financing needs, in that rapidly growing firms have external financing need because working capital needs normally exceed the incremental cash flows from new sales. [6] Aivazian and Booth (2003) support the fact that financial constraints can affect dividend decisions, therefore, firms with relatively less debt have greater financial slack and are more likely to pay and maintain their dividends. 3. Data and econometric method 3.1 Data and variable construction
This study examines the effects of investment opportunity set and corporate finance on the dividend payout policy of emerging market firms. Our dataset is composed of accounting and market data for a large sample of publicly traded firms in 34 emerging market countries over the period 1990-2006. These countries include: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Columbia, Czech, Egypt, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russian Federation, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. This information is obtained through the Corporate Vulnerability Utility of the International Monetary Fund. The corporate vulnerability utility provides indicators for surveillance of the corporate sector and it relies on accounting data from Worldscope and market data mainly from Datastream.
The dependent variable, dividend payout is defined as the ratio of dividend to capital. Dividend is total cash dividend paid to equity and preferred shareholders. The independent variables include investment opportunity set and corporate finance. We also control for profitability, risk, market capitalization, and two other macroeconomic variables: inflation rate and log of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita as a measure of the country's income level.
In terms of the independent variables, Tobin's q is used as a proxy for investment opportunity set. Three measures of corporate finance are used. These are; financial leverage (the ratio of debt to equity), external finance (the ratio of external finance to total finance), and debt maturity (the ratio of short-term debt to total debt).
In terms of the control variables, profitability is measured as return on assets. Profitability is considered as the primary indicator of the firm's capacity to declare and pay dividends. [11] Baker et al. (1985) find that a major determinant of dividend payment is the anticipated level of future earnings. [54] Pruitt and Gitman (1991) also report that current and past years' profits are important in influencing dividend payments. Others such as [38] Jensen et al. (1992), [6] Aivazian and Booth (2003), and [4] Amidu and Abor (2006) find evidence of a positive association between
profitability and dividend payouts. [10] Baker (1989) finds that an important reason cited by firms for not paying dividends is \and DeAngelo (1990) find that a significant proportion of firms with losses over a five year period, tend to omit their dividends entirely. A positive relationship should exist between profitability and dividend payout.
Risk is defined using the O-Score, which is a measure of probability of default. [54] Pruitt and Gitman (1991) find that risk is a major determinant of firms' dividend policy. Firms which have higher risk profiles are more likely to maintain lower dividend payout policy compared with those with lower risk profiles. Using ?value of a firm as a measure of its market risk, [56] Rozeff (1982), [44] Lloyd et al. (1985), and [22] Collins et al. (1996) found a significantly negative relationship between ?and dividend payout. Their findings suggest that firms having a higher level of market risk will pursue lower dividend payout policy. [24] D'Souza (1999) also suggests that risk is significantly and negatively related with firms' dividend payout. We expect risk to be negatively related to dividend payout.
We control for size of the market. This is defined as ratio of market capitalization to GDP. Size of the market is used as a proxy for capital market access. Firms with better access to the capital market should be able to pay higher dividends ([6] Aivazian and Booth, 2003). It is expected that a positive relationship will exist between market capitalization and dividend payout policy.
We also control for two macroeconomic variables: inflation and GDP per capita. Inflation is the inflation rate. GDP per capita is log of GDP per capita and is included as a measure of the country's income level. 3.2 Model specification
We estimate the following panel data regression model: Equation 1 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.] where subscript i and t represent the country and time, respectively. Y is a measure of dividend payout. Invt is a measure of investment opportunity set. Fin are measures of corporate finance variables including, financial
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