Disappearing Dividends, Catering, and Risk
研究1978至1999年间公司支付股息倾向显著下降的现象，发现风险解释了约40%的股息消失，而迎合市场风潮的解释在控制风险后不再显著。
Fama and French (2001a) show that the propensity to pay dividends declines significantly between 1978 and 1999. We examine this "disappearing dividends" puzzle through the lens of risk and report two main findings: (i) Risk is a significant determinant of the propensity to pay dividends, and it explains roughly 40% of disappearing dividends; (ii) We find little support for the view that disappearing dividends reflects firms' catering to transient fads for dividends. Absent risk controls, proxies for fads matter, but these proxies are insignificant once we control for risk. Our results are robust to an extensive battery of robustness tests that vary samples, time periods, proxies for fads, the types of empirical tests, and the nature of payout decisions made by firms. The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.