Optional stock dividends (OSDs) are a novel dividend payout mechanism that induces shareholders to voluntarily choose stock over a cash dividend, saving the firm from having to pay valuable cash reserves without this move being perceived as negative news.
How Is This Research Useful to Practitioners?
Dividend smoothing has been a longtime pursuit of corporate managers who want to
accommodate shareholders’ appetite for systematic dividend payouts and their aversion
to dividend cuts. Yet, it constitutes a major challenge for cash-strapped firms or firms
with significant outflows for debt servicing. For such firms, optional stock dividends
(OSDs) are a preferable alternative to dividend cuts and/or seasoned equity offerings
(SEOs).
Although OSDs are similar to dividend reinvestment plans, OSDs offer a significant discount
on the new stock issued as a dividend payment, which essentially constitutes the intrinsic
value of the warrant-like OSD. From the point of view of option valuation, the higher the
discount on the issued stock and the longer the conversion period, the higher the OSDs will
be valued.
The authors attempt to answer several important questions about OSDs: (1) What types of
firms are more inclined to use OSDs than the less attractive option of cash dividend cuts?
(2) Under what market conditions are OSDs preferable to paying cash dividends funded by
SEOs? (3) What is the market reaction to corporate announcements of OSDs compared with
dividend cuts? (4) What are the determinants of shareholders’ taking up OSDs?
Large, mature firms committed to high dividend yields are more likely to offer OSDs than to
cut dividends when they lack cash and equity. In terms of market conditions, OSDs seem to
accelerate during recessions, when SEOs are more expensive and banks are unwilling to assume
the risk of underwriting them.
The authors’ empirical evidence shows that the market reaction to OSD announcements
is positive, similar to the market reaction to cash dividends, in contrast to the negative
news conveyed by cash dividend cuts or imperative new equity offerings. This finding implies
that investors regard an OSD as a temporary alternative to regular cash dividends, which
does not negate the firm’s favorable future prospects. Finally, firms in which
institutional investors have considerable holdings tend to use more OSDs and to exhibit
higher OSD participation rates than firms with more dispersed ownership. The reason is that
institutional investors are considered better informed about whether exercising the OSD
option will bring more shareholder value than the cash dividend option.
How Did the Authors Conduct This Research?
To find the significant determinants of a firm’s probability of choosing an OSD over
a dividend cut, the authors run multivariate logistic regressions on a sample of 2,033
dividend payments (of which 168 are OSDs) made by 287 French firms listed on the CAC
All-Tradable Index from 2003 through 2012. The sample is restricted to French firms because
of the identical tax treatment of cash and stock dividends in France, thereby removing any
tax considerations from the analysis.
The authors regress a dummy variable that indicates whether an OSD was applied on a series
of independent factors: cash availability, debt, size, market value to book value,
variability of past net income, institutional ownership, and extent of block
shareholdings.
Moreover, to evaluate market reactions to OSDs, the authors regress abnormal stock returns
(market model adjusted) on the day of the OSD announcement against the OSD dummy and several
other control variables, including market value to book value, EBITDA/assets, size, and
year/industry. To account for the possibility of endogeneity of the market reaction, they
also use two-stage least-squares regressions to check for model misspecification, with the
results remaining essentially the same. Finally, the authors check for robustness by
verifying that the intensity and magnitude of share repurchases do not change their initial
conclusions and by performing the logistic regressions on restricted samples matched on the
basis of size, industry, and year of payment.
Abstractor’s Viewpoint
The authors’ main contribution is disentangling OSDs from other actions firms take
to preserve their capital position when in need of cash and equity—for example,
dividend cuts and SEOs’ funding the non-interruption of cash dividend payouts. The
perceived benefits of OSDs compared with those of other options—including a discount
on the stock dividend, the positive market reaction to the announcement, and the cost
savings from avoiding SEOs—are all consistent with the authors’ empirical
results and are corroborated by several facts: Shareholders of OSD-paying firms clearly
favor OSDs, because their votes in favor of receiving OSDs during general meetings amount to
97.5% and their observed choosing of OSDs varies between 55% and 65%, depending on the
discount level.
One limitation of this study is that it does not include “pure” stock
dividends in the evaluation of OSDs. Thus, future research should juxtapose OSDs with stock
dividends in addition to cash dividends. One would expect OSDs to share characteristics of
both dividend types. Assuming perfect capital markets and tax indifference between the two,
an OSD option exercised by shareholders would be equivalent to the firm’s option to
switch from cash to stock dividends with a view toward maximizing shareholder value, thereby
suggesting an “OSD irrelevance” hypothesis.