Methodological Issues in Whistle-blowing Intentions Research: Addressing the Social Desirability Bias and Order Effect Bias

AbstractThe issues of social desirability bias and order effect bias are common problems in ethics. Methodologically, these two problems may weaken the study's validity and reliability thus, making the results of the study invalid. Utilizing vignettes in whistle-blowing research may further add to these problems as the case scenario in the vignettes may enhance respondents’ social desirability bias and the sequence of presentation order of vignettes may then present the problem of vignettes’ order effect bias. The paper addresses these two problems by statistically examining the effects of these two types of bias within the study of whistle-blowing intentions

Effects of dividend tax reform on dividend behavior : a clientele theory approach

Clientele theory claims that investors have their own systematic preference to plan their dividend portfolios based on tax and transaction cost incurred. Due to that, companies need to decide on their dividend payout policy that can attract investors to invest in their company especially when dividend tax laws change from full imputation system to single tier tax system (STT). STT is expected to enhance the simplicity and efficiency of the tax administration process with the intention of encouraging companies to pay dividend. Therefore, this paper attempts to examine company dividend payouts by focusing on two observations periods; during transitional period of STT and after the compulsory effects of STT. This study has selected 141 public listed companies from two of the biggest industries in Malaysia and produced 4,508 observations for the period of 2002 until 2015. This study has used t-test of significant difference to test the changes on dividend payouts by splitting the data into full sample and among the payers only. Initially, during the transitional period, results were consistent with clientele theory when it was found that both regular and special dividend had significantly increased during transitional period. In addition, this study also found that companies with the best performance in terms of return on equity had significantly increased their regular dividend, while moderate companies has significantly increased special dividend during transitional period. But the results were insignificant among poor performance companies. In contrast, the results suggested that there is no significant difference of dividend payouts once the compulsory effects of STT took place

Single tier tax system: analysis of company dividend payouts

The aim of this paper is to analyze company dividend payouts from two observation periods; during transitional period of STT (2008-2013) and after the compulsory effects of STT (2014-2015). Therefore, three research questions need to be tested. Firstly, whether a company pays higher dividend during transitional period compared to before transitional period. Secondly, whether a company pays higher dividend after the compulsory effects of STT compared to before compulsory effects of STT. Lastly, is there any significant difference between top, moderate and low performance companies in their pattern of dividend payouts. Based on a sample of 1,824 observations, it was found that dividend payouts were differently governed between the two periods. Initially, during the transitional period, results were consistent with clientele theory when it was found that there was significantly increase in dividend payouts specifically regular dividend. However, after the compulsory effects of STT, companies reduced their dividend payouts but the difference was insignificant. This study also found that there is significant difference between top, moderate and low performance companies in their pattern of dividend payouts in which top companies had constantly higher dividend payouts than moderate and low companies