Corporate Dividend Policy and Tax Avoidance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates the relation between corporate dividend policy and tax avoidance. The payment of dividends facilitates the transfer of corporate resources, usually cash, from the company to its shareholders. An important aspect of dividend policy is that it is used to address agency problems between shareholders and managers associated with free cash flow. Given that a dividend payment policy is generally considered to be a fixed commitment, and managers may be penalized for cutting dividends, managers may adopt a tax-avoidance strategy to generate additional cash flow to meet this obligation and to fund operating and investment needs. Using data for US publicly listed corporations, we first document that a higher dividend payout ratio is associated with a lower cash-payment-based effective tax rate and a higher book-tax difference, indicating a higher level of tax avoidance. We then test whether tax avoidance increased with the initiation of dividends that occurred in response to the 2003 US dividend income tax cut, and find that it did. The results support our prediction that dividend policy affects tax planning. We employ a Heckman two-stage procedure to address other endogeneities. We also show that our baseline results are robust when an extensive set of tests is applied, including alternative measures of tax avoidance and dividend payout. In addition, we find that the relation between dividend payout and measures of tax avoidance is stronger for firms that experience a non-trivial increase in the dividend payout ratio and that have low institutional ownership, high leverage, and low operating cash flow. Overall, our findings provide persuasive evidence that dividend policy affects the distribution of surplus among shareholders, managers, and the tax authority.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".