On the Differential Market Reaction to Dividend Announcement: Evidence from an Emerging Equity Market

Abstract

The corporate finance literature for market reaction to dividend announcements reports mixed results: some of studies support a positive response of markets as a result of dividend announcement whereas some report negative. This study is an attempt to investigate the heterogeneous market reaction to dividend announcement for 73 firms listed in the Karachi Stock Exchange. We investigated this phenomenon with a novel methodology using both the event study and multivariate regression for the possible effects of firm-specific factors associated with dividend announcements. We report that the market reaction is one-sided as the majority of companies in the sample are with positive CAR for the given period. We cannot ignore the importance of firm-specific factors that have an effect on the dividends but we conclude that the majority of companies in the sample period portray a positive CAR and the market reaction is positive.

Keywords

• dividend announcement
• cumulative abnormal returns
• firm-specific factors
• market reaction