外文翻译---从管理视角下再谈股利政策(编辑修改稿)

外文翻译---从管理视角下再谈股利政策(编辑修改稿)内容摘要：

diminish shareholder wealth. Rozeff (1982), Lang and Litzenberger (1989), Agrawal and Jayaraman (1994), and Jensen, Solberg, and Zorn (1992) provide empirical support for these agency explanations for paying dividends. Finally, the birdinthehand explanation asserts that paying higher dividends increases firm value because dividends represent a “ sure thing” while future share price appreciation is uncertain. Miller and Modigliani (1961) refer to this as the birdinthehand fallacy. Bhattacharya (1979) correctly argues that the riskiness of a project’ s cash flows determines a firm’ s risk and an increase in dividend payout today will simply result in an equivalent drop in the stock’ s exdividend price. Thus, increasing the dividend today will not increase a firm’ s value by reducing the riskiness of future cash flows. Although virtually no empirical support exists for the birdinthehand explanation for paying dividends, we want to determine if managers’ views are consistent with previous theoretical and empirical research. We address three major research questions in this study. First, what views do asdaq managers from dividendpaying firms have on the dividendsetting process?We expect that our survey respondents strongly agree with statements involving Lintner’ s (1956) model on dividend policy. Lintner’ s famous investigation of dividend policy stresses that firms only increase dividends when management believes that earnings have permanently increased. As previously discussed, much support exists for Lintner’ s description of how firms set their dividend expect the Nasdaq firms studied, all of which have established patterns of paying dividends, to hold similar views. Second, do corporate managers of dividendpaying Nasdaq firms believe a firm’ s dividend payout can affect firm value? Based on a set of highly restrictive assumptions, Miller and Modigliani (1961) contend that dividend policy has no effect on either the price of a firm’ s stock or its cost of capital. We expect that managers generally believe that dividend policy matters because they operate in a world in which market imperfections can make dividend policy relevant. Therefore, we expect to observe general agreement by managers of Nasdaq firms participating in our study with statements relating to the relationship between dividend policy and by Lintner (1956), Baker, Farrelly, and Edelman (1985), and others report that managers believe dividend stability is desirable. If this position is correct, investors should prefer stocks that pay more predictable dividends to those that pay the same amount of dividends in the long run but in a more erratic manner. We do not expect the majority of respondents to agree with statements involving the residual dividend model, which implies that dividends are paid out of “ leftover” earnings. Although using the residual policy may help a firm set its longrun target payout ratio, we believe that managers typically do not use this approach to guide the payout in any one year because this would lead to erratic dividends. Third, what explanations for paying dividends do Nasdaq managers tend to favor? As previously discussed, researchers have conducted many studies involving various explanations of why panies pay dividends. The empirical evidence is generally consistent with several hypotheses generated by the dividendsignaling and agencycost models, and inconsistent with tax preference theory. As indicated earlier, there is virtually no empirical evidence supporting the birdinthehand theory. Because our dataset consists of firms with established patterns of paying cash dividends, we expect that managers of such firms are sensitive to the signals they may convey to the market by altering this pattern. Therefore, we expect to find that managers of Nasdaq firms agree more strongly with statements about the asymmetric information explanation for paying dividends than with statements about other explanations. We survey managers of dividendpaying Nasdaq firms to learn their beliefs about the dividend setting process, whether divi。