The Retained Earnings Effect on the Firm’s Market Value: Evidence from Jordan

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of the retention per share compared to the dividend per share by modeling the firm’s market value as a function of the retention per share and the dividend per share for all firms in the Jordanian context using unbalanced panel data analysis for a sample of 2281 firm years covering the period from 2010 to 2021. The results of the pooled sample indicated a strong positive significant effect for dividends per share. However, the retention per share indicated a negative significant effect on the firm’s market value. The other robustness analysis for the two sub-samples and the financial and non-financial sub-samples indicated the same results, consistent with the pooled sample for the two main explanatory variables.

Keywords

• retention per share
• dividend per share
• emerging markets
• Jordan