This paper examines the relation between banks' dividends and their future financial health. Using banks' Nonperforming Loans Ratio, Loan Loss Provision Ratio, and Z-score as proxies for their financial health, I show that there is a strong positive relation between banks' dividends lagged by one quarter and their financial health in the current quarter. This main finding continues to hold following several additional tests, including the application of an instrumental variable approach, the use of change in dividends as the key independent variable, the exclusion of banks that are subject to stress test, the addition of macroeconomic variables, the exclusion of too-big-to-fail banks, and the exclusion of non-depository banks. I also find that the positive relation between banks' dividends and their future financial health is more pronounced for banks with a higher degree of opacity, a lower Tier 1 capital ratio, and during the 2007-2009 financial crisis. This paper contributes to three strands of the finance literature, including the Risk Reduction Hypothesis of dividend signaling in corporate finance, bank dividend policies, and the determinants of banks' financial stability. First, I show that there is a positive relation between banks' dividends lagged by one quarter and their financial health in the current quarter, also meaning that banks' dividends are negatively associated with their future risk conditions. This finding is consistent with the Risk Reduction Hypothesis regarding dividend signaling. Second, Floyd, Li, and Skinner (2015) propose a new idea that banks use dividends to signal financial health, and they rely on this idea to explain why banks have a higher and more stable propensity to pay dividends vis-à-vis industrials during the past several decades. My finding that banks' dividends are positively associated with their future financial health empirically supports this idea proposed by Floyd, Li, and Skinner (2015). Last, to my knowledge, no prior study has attempted to extensively detect a direct relation between banks' dividends and their financial stability. I fill this gap by investigating whether this relation exists. I show that banks' dividends have significantly positive explanatory power on their future financial stability, as proxied by three risk conditions.

This study examines the differential effect of each of the ten largest bank failures on shareholders' wealth of non-failed banks over the period from 1973 through 1984. It examines how contagion and information effects of major bank failures have changed over time. FDIC policy for settling failures has important implications for system stability, and has changed over time. This study's purpose is to provide empirical evidence on the effects of FDIC policy. The FDIC's handling of the Penn Square failure signaled a policy shift and offers a unique opportunity to examine changes in market reactions to large bank failures. The literature on the capital market effects of major bank failures provides limited evidence on the impact of bank failures and related FDIC policy. Most fail to discriminate between contagion and information effects, and conduct analysis on one (or a few) bank failure(s) in the mid-1970s using traditional event study methodology. This study considers multivariate regression (MVRM) an appropriate methodology for bank failures which are likely to have simultaneous impact on non-failed banks. MVRM, which accounts for contemporaneous cross-sectional dependence of residuals, has three advantages over standard residual analysis: no "event clustering" problem, multiple hypotheses tests, and computational efficiency. This study uses daily stock-return data for fifty-one non-failed commercial banks. For each bank failure, the non-failed banksare grouped into three portfolios: "information-related," "large," and "small." The impact on each portfolio is tested for an average effect and joint hypotheses on excess return. This study offers evidence on no contagion effects and lack of information effects before Penn Square, strong information effects since Penn Square, contagion effects in post-Penn Square failures, and capital market discipline on large banks since Penn Square. There has been a change in the nature of the impact of bank failures since Penn Square.