Turner, John D.; Ye, Qing; Zhan, Wenwen - In: Review of Finance 17 (2013) 5, pp. 1787-1826
Why do firms pay dividends? To answer this question, we use a hand-collected data set of companies traded on the London stock market between 1825 and 1870. As tax rates were effectively zero, the capital market was unregulated, and there were no institutional stockholders, we can rule out these...