Does religiosity affect the dividend payouts of Italian-listed companies?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates the relationship between local culture, as measured by religiosity, and dividend payouts based on a sample of 155 Italian firms over the period 2000–2016, yielding 2,382 firm-year observations. We find a significantly positive relationship between religiosity and dividend payouts, with firms headquartered in higher religiosity areas paying more dividends than firms located in lower religiosity areas. We also find no relationship between religiosity and stock returns. An additional test also suggests that religiosity of Italian firms could mitigate agency costs. Our results are consistent with the “bird-in-the-hand theory” and generally consistent with the empirical literature on the relationship between social values (local culture) and corporate decisions. Since religiosity is a determinant of dividend payouts, it also is an appropriate explanatory variable when examining the behavior of a firm’s dividend policies.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".