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Review of Financial Studies Vol. 27 No. 4 2014

Internal Capital Market and Dividend Policies: Evidence From Business Groups

Radhakrishnan Gopalan; Vikram Nanda; Amit Seru

Abstract

We argue that internal capital market imperatives of business groups i.e., reallocation of capital across group firms, influences an affiliated firm's dividend policy. Intuition is developed in a model in which business group insiders distribute dividends from cash-rich firms and use their share of payout to invest in other affiliated firms. Employing multi-country panel-data, we find support for this channel: Dividends by a group firm are positively related with equity-financed investments by its affiliated firms. Results are corroborated by exploiting variation in a firm's investment opportunity generated by changes in import tariff policy: a shock to investment opportunity of an affiliated firm is propagated to dividend policies of other firms in its group.

Volume
27
Issue
4
Pages
1102-1142
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib

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