We survey the empirical literature on corporate dividend policy, with emphasis on develop- ments over the last two decades. We divide our review into two parts. We first summarize what we “know” about dividend policy – the set of observations about the nature of (and trends in) dividend...

It is widely documented that managers strive to maintain smooth dividends. Yet, it is not clear if this behavior reflects investors' preferences. In this paper, we study whether investors indeed value dividend smoothing stocks differently by exploring the implications of dividend smoothing for...

Yes. We show that dividend changes contain information about highly persistent changes in future economic income. Three methodological differences lead us to different conclusions from the extant literature: (i) we use an “event window approach” to cleanly delineate earnings after dividend...

We document the cross-sectional properties of corporate dividend smoothing policies and relate them to extant theories. We find that younger, smaller firms, firms with low dividend yields, more volatile earnings and returns, and firms with fewer and more disperse analyst forecasts smooth less....