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| Semi-Mandatory Dividend Policy and Cost of Equity |
| WANG Chunfei, GUO Yunnan
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School of Accountancy, Central University of Finance and Economics;
School of International Trade and Economics, University of International Business and Economics |
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Abstract Legal protection is an effective method for encouraging large shareholders to share benefits with small and medium shareholders. In countries where laws are incomplete, mandatory dividend policies offset the deficiencies of inadequate legal protection. Nevertheless, mandatory dividend policies have only been adopted in a few countries, including Brazil and Chile, and there are few studies of these regimes. Chinese regulatory departments have offered guidance to listed companies in terms of dividend payout since 2001. In that year, there was a significant increase in the number of companies paying dividends, but in many cases only meager dividends were paid in response to the regulatory policies. To increase the dividend payout ratio, in 2006, China's regulatory departments directly restricted dividend payout ratios and linked them to refinancing. The Decisions on Amending Some Provisions on Cash Dividends by Listed Companies (hereinafter referred to as the “Decisions”) was promulgated in 2008, and it made additional specifications to dividend payout modes. It is noteworthy that the Decisions highlighted the disclosure of information about dividend payouts. Thereafter, in 2012, the regulatory departments further improved the dividend rules, formulating fairly characteristic dividend payout regulatory rules, which are called semi-mandatory dividend policies in academic papers.
The implementation of semi-mandatory dividend policies has not resulted in the ideal division of dividends. The literature shows that semi-mandatory dividend policies may decrease the financial flexibility of growth companies and have adverse effects on these companies. Some studies suggest that semi-mandatory dividend policies have hardly any effect on “mean” companies' distribution of cash dividends, while forcing high growth companies that need refinancing to distribute cash dividends. As significant “negative incentives” for companies with high cash dividends, these dividend policies have even led to a certain decrease in the overall cash payout ratio. In addition, they have other unexpected adverse effects, for example tax costs. Most research focuses on regulatory costs and generally confirms the so-called regulatory “paradox.”
These studies of semi-mandatory dividend policies adopt the perspective of regulatory costs and ignore an important issue: semi-mandatory dividend policies may also create regulatory benefits. In our opinion, these policies constitute a mechanism of profit sharing between shareholders and are beneficial because they help investors to develop stable expectations about dividends and thus realize governance “premiums.”
This paper uses the new regulatory policies in 2008 as a natural experiment. It evaluates the economic consequences of semi-mandatory dividend policies from the perspective of their governance effects. It finds that these policies significantly reduce the equity costs of corporations, which is inconsistent with the findings in the literature that the policies result in a regulatory “paradox.” Further analyses show that the effect of semi-mandatory dividend policies is stronger in companies with substantial agency conflicts. In addition, this paper examines the limitations of semi-mandatory dividend policies. It finds that the governance effects of semi-mandatory dividends are not evident in companies with low-quality accounting information or companies that are subject to strong financing constraints.
The contributions of this paper are as follows. First, the economic consequences of semi-mandatory dividend policies are evaluated from the perspective of governance “premiums”, which enriches the literature about these policies. Second, this paper assesses the effects of semi-mandatory dividend policies on equity costs using the difference-in-differences method, making the findings of this paper robust. Third, the findings of this paper may be used as references for modifying and improving the regulatory policies for semi-mandatory dividend payouts.
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Received: 31 January 2019
Published: 02 September 2021
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