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投資機會和投資者保護機制對控股股東派息的影響
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shareholders to mask their expropriation activities from minority shareholders through the
payment of higher dividends. Our results could be useful for policy makers in emerging
market, especially in China. Chinese securities regulator believes dividend payment being
an effective mechanism to protect minority investors, and has made dividend payment
mandatory to meet certain regulatory requirements, regardless of the investment
opportunity and financing strategy. Our results suggest that enhancement of the legal
institutions is more effective in achieving the goal of investment protection.
However, caution is advised in interpreting the findings of this study given the lack
of precision of the measures of control divergence and legal institutional factors. This
study uses the ownership data of Claessens et al. (2000) for year 1996 for East Asian firms
and of Faccio and Lang (2002) for the period 1997 to 1999 for Western European firms.
We also use the legal protection measures that were constructed by La Porta et al. (1998)
based on data from 1980 to 1998. The application of these measures to our sample period
of 1990-2000 assumes that circumstances did not change significantly over the testing
period. This study could be further extended by including listed firms in China and the
U.S. While Chinese stock market is characterized by weak investor protection mechanism
and pervasive expropriation of minority shareholders, the U.S. stock market regulatory
framework is claimed to be the leader in protecting investor rights. However, there has
been no empirical study investigating corporate dividend policy in the context of this
study. The extension could serve as a validity test of the documented results in this study.