The Optimal Dividend Payout Model with Terminal Values and Its Application

Abstract

For some firms with large nonliquid assets, preferred shareholders can still get back a little bit of money when the firms finish disbursement of loans at the status of bankruptcy. For such a situation, to investigate the optimal dividend policy, a stochastic dynamic dividend model with nonzero terminal bankruptcy values is put forward in this paper. Moreover, an analytic solution for the optimal objective function of the discounted dividends is provided and verified. An important application of this result is that it can be employed to construct the solution for the optimal value function on the dividend problem with bailouts at bankruptcy. Further, the relationship for the solutions of these two different problems is demonstrated. In the end, some numerical examples are provided to support our theoretical results and the corresponding economic interpretations are illustrated.