公司分红分配机制分析.pdf

Selected Paper No. 57: Do Dividends Really Matter? by Merton H. Miller Graduate School of Business The University of Chicago Merton H. Miller, Leon Carroll Marshall Distinguished Service Professor of Finance in the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, has been active in the application of economic analysis to a wide variety of management problems in finance. Before joining the Graduate School of Business faculty, Professor Miller had been an economist with the U.S. Treasury Department and with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, and a faculty member of Carnegie Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Industrial Administration. He received the A.B. degree magna cum laude from Harvard and the Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins. He is a former president of the American Finance Association and is a fellow of the Econometric Society. He serves as coeditor of the Journal of Business. Professor Miller has presented these views on dividends recently as part of a seminar on current management issues in Stockholm, Sweden. Do Dividends Really Matter? I. The Question There are few aspects of corporate financial policy where the gap between the academics and the practitioners is larger than that of dividend policy. The academic consensus is that dividends really don’t matter very much. The market does not, and should not be expected to, pay premium prices for firms adopting what are sometimes called “generous” dividend policies. If anything, generous dividends may actually cause the shares to sell at a discount because of the tax penalties on dividends as opposed to capital gains. Most practitioners on the other hand, both among corporate officials and investment bankers, still continue to insist that a firm’s dividend policy matters a great deal. And they’ll cite example after example of companies whose price collapsed after passing a regular dividend; or whose price jumped