Dividend cuts and a firm's investment opportunity set

Abstract

This paper re‐examines corporate dividend payout policy by focusing on how investors evaluate dividend cuts. Our focus is to understand why despite the documented on average negative market response, many dividend‐cutting firms experience a positive market response. We juxtapose a well‐established literature on corporate payout policies with the literature on the role of prior information in investor evaluation of newly arrived information and document that the market responds positively to dividend cuts when firms have positive investment opportunity sets. Our results support the primary thesis that not all dividend cuts are bad news—it depends. We validate this result by documenting that firms cutting dividends in the presence of investment opportunities do make significant investments such as capital expenditures and merger and acquisition activities in future years. Furthermore, we also find that future operating profitability is higher for dividend‐cutting firms with relatively higher investment opportunities. We also document that among dividend‐cutting firms, there is a statistically significant difference in the buy‐and‐hold returns for up to 2 years, between firms with high versus low investment opportunities. This provides support for the economic significance of our results. These results provide new evidence on how investors interpret corporate payout policies to distinguish among dividend cuts.