Dividend announcements and stock returns: a retrospective analysis

Purpose This study aims to provide insights into different aspects of the extant literature on the effects of dividend announcements. Along with other outputs of a bibliometric study, this study provides deeper insights into the concentration of the extant literature and suggest future research agendas. Design/methodology/approach This study uses the bibliometric, network and content analysis of the dividend announcement literature indexed in Scopus. This study presents the temporal analysis, the network of authors, countries, author citations and the co-occurrence of author keywords. This study provides the concentration of the extant literature in three clusters and unearth some key future research areas. This study uses the latent Dirichlet allocation method for robustness. Findings A total of 54 documents examining the US sample have received 1,804 citations. Interestingly, the first article on emerging markets was published in 2002, when at least 34 articles on developed markets had already been published from 1982 to 2001. The content analysis of top-cited literature unveils diverse insights into dividend announcements’ effects on financial markets. Contagion effects negatively impact non-announcing banks, particularly larger ones. Dividend maintenance affects stock market momentum, influencing loser returns. While current dividend/earnings news may not predict future company performance, information content dominates bond market reactions to post-dividend announcements. Concomitantly, while financially constrained firms exhibit short-term gains but worse long-term performance following dividend increases, larger stock dividends send stronger market signals in China. Originality/value This study significantly contributes to the bibliometric and content analysis literature by analyzing the sample documents based on the sample examined. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous bibliometric study in this domain has been conducted to explore the markets (developed and emerging) to which the samples examined belong and the quality of publications from developed and emerging markets.