Corporate Dividend Policy and Tax Avoidance

This article investigates the relation between corporate dividend policy and tax avoidance. The payment of dividends facilitates the transfer of corporate resources, usually cash, from the company to its shareholders. An important aspect of dividend policy is that it is used to address agency problems between shareholders and managers associated with free cash flow. Given that a dividend payment policy is generally considered to be a fixed commitment, and managers may be penalized for cutting dividends, managers may adopt a tax-avoidance strategy to generate additional cash flow to meet this obligation and to fund operating and investment needs. Using data for US publicly listed corporations, we first document that a higher dividend payout ratio is associated with a lower cash-payment-based effective tax rate and a higher book-tax difference, indicating a higher level of tax avoidance. We then test whether tax avoidance increased with the initiation of dividends that occurred in response to the 2003 US dividend income tax cut, and find that it did. The results support our prediction that dividend policy affects tax planning. We employ a Heckman two-stage procedure to address other endogeneities. We also show that our baseline results are robust when an extensive set of tests is applied, including alternative measures of tax avoidance and dividend payout. In addition, we find that the relation between dividend payout and measures of tax avoidance is stronger for firms that experience a non-trivial increase in the dividend payout ratio and that have low institutional ownership, high leverage, and low operating cash flow. Overall, our findings provide persuasive evidence that dividend policy affects the distribution of surplus among shareholders, managers, and the tax authority.