Dividends and taxes: The moderating role of agency conflicts
研究发现大股东与小股东之间的代理冲突会显著影响股息对税收的反应：冲突越高的公司，股息下降幅度越小，表明股息政策在税收与代理成本之间权衡。
We find that potential conflicts between majority and minority shareholders strongly influence how dividends respond to taxes. When the controlling shareholder has a smaller stake, the incentives to extract private benefits are stronger – a shareholder conflict that can be mitigated by dividend payout. We study a large and clean regulatory shock in Norway that increases the dividend tax rate for all individuals from 0% to 28%. We find that dividends drop less the higher the potential shareholder conflict, suggesting that dividend policy trades off tax and agency considerations. The average payout ratio falls by 30 percentage points when the conflict potential is low, but by only 18 points when it is high. These lower dividends cannot be explained by higher salaries to shareholders or diverse liquidity needs. We also observe a strong increase in indirect ownership of high-conflict firms through tax-exempt holding companies and suggest policy implications for intercorporate dividend taxation.