This paper presents an alternative theory of payout policy explaining why firms do not perfectly substitute share repurchases for dividends. Existing empirical findings have shown that individual investors tend to prefer high dividends, whereas institutional investors appear to prefer low...

We provide the first international evidence on the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on dividend policy. Using data from 19 countries, we find that a high level of EPU is positively associated with dividend payout. This evidence is robust to using alternative dividend payout measures,...

This paper examines the impact of policy uncertainty on corporate dividend payouts in a sample of 20,856 US firms over the period 1991-2020. In line with the agency theory, we find evidence that firms pay higher dividends to mitigate agency problems during periods of high policy uncertainty. The...