Controlling for these characteristics, we find some hints of declines in the propensity to pay dividends in most of the sample countries, particularly among those firms that appear to be at the margin for paying dividends; i.e., those with low to medium ratios of earned-to-contributed capital. However, outside of the US, the declines are small and the evidence is not particularly robust. Moreover, to the extent that there are propensity declines, they are driven primarily by the failure of newly listed firms to initiate dividends when expected to do so. Dividend abandonments and the failure to initiate by existing nonpayers are economically unimportant except in Japan. Even in Japan, however, we find that unexpected abandonments can be plausibly explained by financial difficulties experienced by Japanese firms during the economic slowdown of the 1990s. The bottom line, therefore, is that the data cannot reject the hypothesis that there has been no meaningful change in corporate dividend policies in the sample countries over the 1989–2002 period. While we also cannot reject the possibility that there have been small reductions in the propensity to pay dividends in some countries, such reductions are at most limited to newly listed firms.
The importance of the mix of earned/contributed equity as a determinant of dividend policies around the world casts doubt on the importance of signaling as a first-order determinant of dividend policies. As noted in DeAngelo, DeAngelo, and Stulz (2006), firms with low earned/contributed equity would appear to be the ideal candidates for dividend signaling because these firms are less mature and it is, therefore, more difficult to gauge their future prospects. Yet, these are precisely the firms that do not pay dividends.
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