The perception of dividends by Canadian managers: new survey evidence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this research is to analyze survey results on the perception of dividends by managers of dividend‐paying firms listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). Design/methodology/approach Managers from a sample of 291 dividend‐paying TSX‐listed Canadian firms were surveyed about their views on dividends. Findings The most important factors influencing dividend policy are the level of current and expected future earnings, the stability of earnings, and the pattern of past dividends. Despite dramatic differences in the level of ownership concentration between Canadian and US firms, their corresponding managers' views on the determinants of dividends are similar. Canadian managers believe that dividend policy affects firm value but express little agreement with the theory of a residual dividend policy. They express strong support for the signaling and lifecycle explanations for paying dividends, but not for the bird‐in‐the‐hand, tax‐preference and dividend clientele, agency cost, or catering explanations. Compared with non‐dividend payers, Canadian dividend‐paying firms are significantly larger and more profitable, have greater cash reserves and ownership concentration, and have fewer growth opportunities. Originality/value This study updates and expands previous survey‐based research on dividends and provides new evidence from managers of Canadian firms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".