Dividend Initiations and Earnings Surprises
比较了首次公开募股后启动股利与未启动股利的公司，发现启动股利公司的盈利增长和盈利意外更优，且股利信号能区分公司业绩差异。
University of Oklahoma. This paper examines the performance of newly public firms and compares those firms that initiated dividends with those that did not. Earnings increases following the dividend initiation and earnings surprises for initiating firms are more favorable than those for noninitiating firms. Furthermore, had noninitiating firms declared dividends that matched the dividend yield, dividend-to-sales ratio, or dividend-to-assets ratio of initiating firms, the promised dividend would have equaled about 8.5% of earnings, significantly above the 0.05 level for initiating firms. In contrast to DeAngelo, DeAngelo, and Skinner (1996), these results suggest that dividends signal differences in performance between otherwise comparable firms.