1、外文文献翻译译文 一、外文原文 原文： Ownership Structure and Dividend Policy Evidence from the Tunisian Stock Market Abstract The aim of this paper is to identify and analyze the influence of shareholder ownership identity on dividend policy for a panel of Tunisian firms from 1995 to 2001.Our results indicate that T
2、unisian companies with highly concentrated ownership distribute more dividends. We find that there is a significant negative correlation between institutional ownership and distributed dividend level. The relation between dividend policy and state ownership is positive. Introduction Dividend payout
3、decisions are one of the fundamental components of corporate policy and have been viewed as an issue of interest in the financial literature. Dividend, reward to stockholder for their investment and risk bearing, depends on various factors. Foremost of these determinants are level of profits, financ
4、ing constraints, investment opportunities, size of the firm, and pressure from shareholders and regulatory authorities.The relationship between dividend policy and agency costs has been a recent development in the corporate finance theory focusing on the problem of how dividend policy can be used in
5、 reducing the agency cost. This association is based on the idea that monitoring of the firm and its management is helpful in reducing agency conflicts and in convincing the market that the managers are not in a position to abuse their position. The basic motivation for the agency models of dividend
6、s is that unless a firms profits are paid out as dividends, corporate managers may divert the cash flow for personal use or pursue unprofitable investment projects. The agency models on dividends can be divided into two distinct groups. The first range of theories considers dividend payouts as a sol
7、ution of the agency conflict between managers and shareholders, as well as between controlling shareholders and outside shareholders. Contrary to this view, the second range of agency models argues that dividend payout policies are substitutes for governance problems in a firm. In this context owner
8、ship structure corresponds to the distribution of equities among shareholders. Many authors argue that when large shareholders are firms, the manager distributes higher dividend than similar firms when their large shareholders are individuals. Accordingly, the major purpose of this paper is to ident
9、ify and analyze the influence of shareholder identity on dividend policy for a panel of Tunisian firms from 1995 to 2001. The most finding of the study indicates that Tunisian companies with highly concentrated ownership distribute more dividends. We show that there is a significantly negative corre
10、lation between the institutional ownership and the level of dividend distributed. The relation between dividend policy and state ownership is positive and the ownership concentration measured by the five largest shareholders affects positively the dividend per share. Large shareholder, monitoring an
11、d Dividend Policy In most countries, publicly traded firms often have large controlling shareholders. This observation contrasts with the Berle and Means (1932) image of the “widely held corporation” in which shareholders have little incentive to monitor managers and prevent them from putting their
12、own personal interest above that of the companys shareholders. As suggested by Pagano and Rell (1998), a potential remedy is to have a less dispersed share ownership structure: shareholders with a large stake in the company have a greater incentive to play an active role in corporate decisions becau
13、se they partially internalize the benefits from their monitoring effort. According to Grossman and Hart (1980), Shleifer and Vishny (1986) suggest that management should be monitored, and this monitoring must be done by large shareholders. The presence of such shareholders mitigates the free rider p
14、roblem of monitoring a management team, and hence reducing the agency costs. Shareholders with large stake have incentive to bear monitoring costs because gains from investing in monitoring activities exceed the costs. More recent works suggest the benefits of large shareholders in a different conte
15、xt. Laporta etal (1999), Bebchuk (1999) and Gomes (2000) argue that in the countries when the legal and institutional frameworks do not offer sufficient protection for outside investors, concentrated ownership can mitigate the shareholder conflicts. The benefits of large shareholding highlighted in
16、the theoretical and empirical literature may be summarized in terms of the convergence of interest hypothesis and the efficient monitoring hypothesis. According to these hypotheses, large shareholders play a basic role in corporate governance and hence reduce agency costs. When a firm has free cash
17、flows, managers are not allowed to expend them on unprofitable projects but they are forced to distribute these funds as dividends. According to the substitute model of dividends developed by Laporta et al (2000), dividend policy can be seen as a substitute for conflicts of interests between insider
18、s and outsiders. Zwiebel (1996) argues that managers voluntary pay dividends in order to avert challenges for control. Myers (2000) proposes that managers can continue in their current positions only if outside equity investors believe that corporate insiders will pay future dividends. The identity
19、of controlling shareholder is important in determining financial policies of firms. Khan (2005) argues that financial institutions play a governance role in the firm. They are more likely to access to information and monitor managers. Michaely and Roberts (2006) compare the dividend policies of priv
20、ately and publicly held firms. They find that public firms distribute a large fraction of earnings through dividends and that their dividend policies are more sensitive to investment opportunities and free cash flow relative to those of private firms. Large shareholders, Risk of expropriation and Di
21、vidend Policy The presence of large shareholders with high stocks or controlling shareholders may be harmful to the firms related parties. As argued by Shleifer and Vishny (1997), when large shareholders gain nearly full control, they start generating private benefits of control that are not shared with minority shareholders. Controlling shareholders may
