Dividend Timing and Global Dividend Premium
Dividend-paying stocks outperform non-payers by a meaningful margin, even after controlling for traditional global and regional risk factors.
Equity duration and predictability
Equity duration has increased dramatically. As firms reinvest more and delay payouts to the future, asset prices become more sensitive to changes in expected returns rather than fundamentals.
Anti-Dividend Investing: Yield Matters—But Not How You Think!
Dividends are the comfort food of investing. Who wouldn’t love feeling like they’re getting a seemingly “free” payout just for holding onto a stock? As with all good things, there's a little more—perhaps a whole lot more—to the story. Here’s why: even in a tax-free setting, selling stocks before dividend payouts can lead to abnormal returns.
Should investors be indifferent to dividend impact on stock returns?
In their 1961 paper, “Dividend Policy, Growth, and the Valuation of Shares,” Merton Miller and Franco Modigliani famously established that dividend policy should be irrelevant to stock returns. As they explained it, at least before frictions like trading costs and taxes, investors should be indifferent to $1 in the form of a dividend (causing the stock price to drop by $1) and $1 received by selling shares. This must be true, unless you believe that $1 isn’t worth $1. This theorem has not been challenged since, at least in the academic community.
Can Investment Flows Affect Prices? Yep.
Traditional finance theory suggests that stocks prices always reflect their fair market values based on publicly available information. Or in academic parlance, the "semi-strong" form efficient markets hypothesis serves as the null. What are the implications of this hypothesis? Well, the hypothesis suggests that the only reason a stock price will move is due to a shift in fundamentals (either through a change in expected cash flows or via the discount rate). But what about supply and demand shifts?
Dividends, Stock Prices, and Inflation.
Building on the concepts presented in my Dividends Are Different article, here we present data and observations highlighting the relationship between inflation and 1) company [...]
Dividends are Different
There has been abundant discussion regarding the utility of dividends.[ref]Here are a few examples: dividends, dividends, and more dividends…and Jon See'ds piece on buybacks, if [...]
High Payout Ratios Predict Higher Earnings Growth–Huh?
Every quarter, boards across America wrestle with the complex question of dividend policy. Perhaps the company has excess cash that should be paid out as [...]