La decisión de dividendos en la empresa españolaun contraste de teorías alternativas

Zusammenfassung

The aim of this paper is to show an empirical analysis of the main determinants of the dividend pay out decision in the big non-financial Spanish firms. After a review of the most outstanding theories which are supposed to explain in some extend the so called puzzle of dividends, we test them. In so doing, we have analyzed a sample of companies in two different ways: first of all, a descriptive analysis and later a causality analysis. The results we achieve confirm the influence of traditional variables in the dividend pay out firms' decisions like investment profitability and liquidity. Besides, some more variables arise whose justification is closely related to the theory of agency and the asymmetric information. On the other hand, the fiscal asymmetries hypothesis do not seem to be supported by the results of our research