The Proposal of Corporate Payout Decisions’ Modelling

Abstract

Decisions on a company’s profit sharing are the most important financial decisions for both the shareholders as a source of additional income and the company as the source of cash outflow. The net profit can be transferred to the shareholders in the form of dividends or stock repurchases. Due to the fact that for both, dividends and share repurchase, the source of payments is the net profit (either last year profit, or retained profit), it can be assumed that decisions regarding dividend payments and share repurchases are interdependent. Therefore, a very important and so far without an unequivocal solution is the problem of measuring the relationship between decisions on dividend payments and share repurchases (whether to pay out a company’s profit in one of the forms, in both forms or at all). Taking into consideration the possibility of interdependence of both forms of corporate payout policy as well as the fact that data describing payout policy are of panel nature and the relationships between the decisions and the determinants may be non-linear, two simultaneous equations second order panel binomial choice model with random specific effects, the parameters of which are estimated in the same way as in the two stage least squares, was suggested for modelling the payout policy. The modelling procedure was verified by the estimation of the model on a balanced panel of 153 companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange over the period 2008–2016 (1,377 observations). The study results show that the proposed procedure enables the selection of appropriate factors determining the decisions on dividends and share repurchases and the assessment of the relationship between them. It takes into the consideration the panel nature of the data and the possibility of heterogeneity and removes the phenomenon of endogeneity in the model, thereby, filling an existing gap in the literature on corporate payout decisions.