The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Corporate Dividend Policy of Moroccan Listed Firms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent literature provides conflicting findings and remains inconclusive regarding the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on firms’ dividend policies. In this paper, we examine the dividend policy of Moroccan firms listed in the Casablanca Stock Exchange during the COVID-19 shock. Using panel data from 2015 to 2021 of non-financial listed firms, we observe that the proportion of dividend cuts during the last seven years (2015–2021) achieved its highest level on the onset of the crisis. Furthermore, results of the ordinary least square (OLS) regressions demonstrate that the COVID-19 shock has negatively affected the dividend payout of Moroccan listed firms. This study implies that, in times of economic crisis, Moroccan firms exhibit risk-averse behavior by prioritizing the retention of earnings over distributing dividends, scarifying, therefore, the transmission of positive signals to investors and external stakeholders. Furthermore, our results reveal that profitability, growth opportunities, leverage, and size are relevant determinants of corporate dividend policy.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".