Dividend Policy and Firm Valuation—A Study of Indian Electrical Equipment Manufacturing Industry

Abstract

Dividend policy relevance has been researched extensively, but little consensus has been built from the findings. There are many factors that affect a given firm’s dividend policy which can be found in the literature such as risk faced by the firm, cash flow situation of the firm, agency costs etc. According to Bhattacharya (1979) dividend decision of a firm can be seen as a source of signal which shows that profitable firms with good project investment opportunities will pay higher dividends to present themselves distinct from other firms which are having projects with lesser profits. This paper attempts to analyze whether the dividend policy of a firm affects the market value of a firm and the shareholders’ wealth. We have set our objective to find out the impact of dividend policy on the shareholders’ wealth in the Indian electrical equipment manufacturing industry. For this , we have adopted a sample of dividend paying electrical machinery manufacturing companies listed in Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). There were totally 439 companies in the industry of electrical machinery manufacturing. Out of them 194 companies were listed in the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and there were 72 companies paying dividends frequently. Therefore the data of these 72 companies w ere taken into consideration. Our study revealed the empirical evidence with some of the dividend irrelevance theories such as M&M. The results indicate that there is a negative non-linear association between market value of a share and the dividend yields.