Social environment and corporate payouts
研究发现，位于美国社会资本（信任与诚实）较高州或县的企业，其股利支付水平也更高，且这一关系在监督较弱时更为显著，表明区域社会因素影响企业分红决策。
We investigate if macro-level social capital, which captures the notions of trust and honesty, has any effects on corporate payout policy. We find that firms situated in U.S. states (or counties) with higher levels of social capital (SC) have higher dividend payouts (DP). These results survive a battery of robustness tests dealing with inference and various forms of endogeneity. We find that the positive SC-DP association is more prominent when monitoring is weak. We also find that the positive SC-DP association remains when we account for internal social capital, political corruption, federal and state income taxes, and other possible dividend clienteles such as in-state pension funds and pension-age populations. Our study contributes to the literatures that regional locations and social considerations constitute clienteles who affect important corporate strategic decisions such as corporate payouts.