A Distribuição de dividendos como ferramenta sinalizadora de desempenho futuro nas companhias listadas na BM&FBOVESPA

Abstract

The decision of how much to retain and distribute to shareholders is a part of the financing and investment policy of the company, also known as dividend policy. The dividend policy is increasingly considered as a strategic differentiator for attracting new investors. There are numerous research about dividend policy and some theories are used to support it, such as the Dividend irrelevance theory, Bird in hand theory, Tax preference theory, the Clientele effect of dividends, Agency theory and the Signaling theory. The present study has the general purpose of investigating the relationship between distributed dividends and future performance of companies listed on BM&Fbovespa stock market under the perspective of the Signaling theory. The researched population comprises the companies that had been listed on BM&FBovespa stock market between 2002 and 2014. This is a documental research due to the procedure used for data collecting extracted from Economática® base and the website of BM&FBovespa stock market. To conduct the study we collected annual financial data of 105 companies remaining in the sample, totaling 1,050 observations which after the removal of outliers data, remained 910. We used panel data analysis through the Pooled methodology for estimation of coefficients. The dividend distribution same as dividend declared in this research was considered as an explanatory variable, and the future performance was measured by the Net income and EBITDA, both dependent variables. According to the results it was possible to characterize the companies listed on BM&FBovespa, as well as portraying a panorama of dividend policies adopted by these companies. And through the three models chosen to estimate whether the dividends distributed are recognized by the market as a signaling tool of future performance in order to achieve the objective of this research we can say that model (1) did not show consistent results with the support literature, while the results of models (2) and (3) provide support to the Signaling theory about the future performance in the first year following the dividend distribution.