Dividend policy and behaviour, and security price reaction to the announcement of dividends in an emergency market : a study of companies listed on the Dhaka stock exchange

Abstract

'The harder we look at the dividend picture, the more it seems like a puzzle, with pieces that just don't fit together'(Black 1976, p. 5). A number of researchers provide insights, theoretical as well as empirical, into the dividend policy puzzle. However, the issue as to why firms pay dividends is as yet unresolved. Several rationales for the corporate dividend policy propose in the literature, but there is no unanimity among researchers. Everyone, however, agrees that the issue is important, as dividend payment is one of the most commonly observed phenomenon in corporations worldwide. Several studies have been conducted on dividend policy and behaviour, and security price reaction to the announcement of dividends but a very few studies have been conducted on emerging markets, therefore, a quite lot of issues of the emerging markets are still unresolved. Therefore, the existing published evidence is of limited relevance in identifying the appropriate dividend policy and behaviour, and security price reaction to the announcement of dividends in an emerging market. The objectives of this thesis are threefold: firstly, to identify the detenninants of dividend policy, secondly, to investigate the dividend behaviour, and thirdly, to identify the security price reaction to the announcement of dividends in an emerging market. The empirical results identify leverage, size, insider ownership, and collateralizable assets as the major determinants of dividend policy. However, the empirical results document that dividend decision is primarily governed by cash flow for measuring the capacity of the companies to pay dividends and dividends paid in the previous years, i. e., lagged dividends. The empirical results also identify Britain's (1966) partial adjusted model as the best-fit dividend behavioural model. Furthermore,as insiders trade in the market, so, information used to be adjusted with the share prices before announcement and consequently dividend announcement does not carry any new information to the market. Therefore, the empirical results document no significant impact of dividend announcements on the security prices of an emerging market. Finally, the empirical results identify that the emerging markets are inefficient