The Research Of Cash Dividend Policy Of Listed Companies In China

The dividend policy is considered as one of the top three accounting decisions. Dividend policy is a listed company’s decision-making problem about the distribution of profits. There are three ways to distribute dividends, including cash dividends, shareholders and retained earnings. Dividend policy is significant for the company’s operation and growth. Therefore the research on dividend distribution of listed company has important theoretical and practical significance.Among the three ways of distributing dividends, the distribution of cash dividends is the main way to distribute in the western securities market, whose system is more developed and better in all aspects than ours. In our country’s securities market, the phenomena that the listed companies pay a little cash dividends, even pay no cash dividends is very common. The traditional researchers always use the agency cost theory and signaling theory to explain this phenomenon. With behavioral finance being brought in, a new explanation to the cash dividends distribution behavior of listed companies emerges. This research, based on the catering theory, tries to probe into the truth of dividends policy, especially the cash dividends policy.This research, taking Small and Medium-sized Enterprises from2006to2012as the sample, try to prove whether the propensity to pay cash dividends of listed companies is catering the demand of investors and whether the catering theory can explain the behavior of distribution of cash dividends of our listed companies. This research firstly introduce the contents of catering theory particularly, and then analysis the current situation and character of distribution of cash dividends of our listed companies, mainly including the following aspects:①statistical describe and analysis on the distribution of cash dividends;②analysis the impact factors of the distribution of cash dividends;③based on the conclusion of this research, investigate whether this theory can explain the distribution behavior of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises.Managers cater to investors by paying dividends when investors put a stock price premium on payers and not paying when investors prefer nonpayers. According to the conclusion of Logistic regression and simple linear regression, the catering theory does not apply in our securities market. Besides this, we can also conclude that the LTBL the profitability, could impact the cash dividends distribution behavior of listed companies, and cannot be sure of the influence of the size of listed companies, the growth ability, ownership concentration.The innovation of this research include following three points. First of all, this research summarized the current dividends distribution situation of our listed companies in the market. Second of all, this research introduced the thought of behavioral finance, so that the difference of emotion and cognition of investors can be fully considered. Besides this, the introducing also produced new direction to research this field. Finally, this research selects the data, which is from the end of the reform of the shareholder structure to2012, because the writer wanted to eliminate its effects on dividends distribution.At the same time, this research also has several shortages. First, it only investigated the behavior of cash dividends distribution, and ignored investigating the other two types of distribution. Second, it cannot eliminate the impacts of the reform by the way of selecting data. Last, this research only investigated whether the listed companies distributed dividends, but it did not investigated the level of dividends distribution. So is hard to avoid concluding roughly.