What are the costs and benefits of mandatory dividend rules? On the one hand, they make it harder for controlling shareholders to divert corporate assets. On the other hand, they reduce the internal funds available for firms to invest, possibly leading to the loss of valuable projects. To assess this trade-off, we look at investment and dividend decisions in a sample of public firms in Brazil. We show that a significant fraction of these firms use loopholes of Brazil's mandatory dividend rules to avoid paying dividends. And yet, the dividend rules are effective. They help explain why the average dividend yield in Brazil is higher than in the U.S., without making it harder for firms to invest.

Using unique administrative data on firm-to-firm payments and bank-to-firm lending, we investigate how lending to a firm is affected by same-bank lending to the firm's customers and suppliers. We show that the supply of loans to a firm increases when the firm's customers have loans from the same bank. We also find that negative information about a firm's top customer causes banks to tighten the loan supply to the firm, and particularly more so when the firm's sales are concentrated on this customer. These results suggest that lending to firms connected through the supply chain conveys valuable information to banks.