外文翻译--股利政策：一个综述.docVIP

PAGE 外文原文 Dividend policy: a review 1. Introduction Explaining dividend policy has been one of the most difficult challenges facing financial economists. Despite decades of study, we have yet to completely understand the factors that influence dividend policy and the manner in which these factors interact. Allen and Michaely (1995) conclude that ‘‘much more empirical and theoretical research on the subject of dividends is required before a consensus can be reached’’ (p. 833). The fact that a major textbook such as Brealey and Myers (2002) lists dividends as one of the ten important unsolved problems in finance reinforces this conclusion. The first empirical study of dividend policy was provided by Lintner (1956), who surveyed corporate managers to understand how they arrived at the dividend policy. Lintner found that an existing dividend rate forms a bench mark for the management. Companies’ management usually displayed a strong reluctance to reduce dividends. Lintner opined that managers usually have reasonably definitive target payout ratios.Over the years, dividends are increased slowly at a particular speed of adjustment, so that the actual payout ratio moves closer to the target payout ratio. 2. Dividend irrelevance and tax clienteles While Lintner (1956) provided the stylistic description of dividends, the watershed in the theoretical modelling of dividends was almost surely the classic paper Miller and Modigliani (1961), which first proposed dividend irrelevance. Essentially, their model is a one-period model under certainty. Given a firm’s investment program, the dividend policy of the firm is irrelevant to the firm value, since a higher dividend would necessitate more sale of stock to raise finances for the investment program. The crucial assumption here is that the futuremarket valuewill remain unaffected by current dividends. The argument rests on the assumptions that the investment program is determined independently and that every stockholder earns