Qian Chen. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 34-36). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Introduction --- p.1 / Literature --- p.3 / Chapter I --- Disappearing Dividends --- p.5 / Chapter 1. --- Dividend Facts - from U.S. to Hong Kong --- p.5 / Chapter 2. --- Aggregate dividends --- p.16 / Chapter 3. --- Dividend concentration and Earning concentration --- p.21 / Chapter II --- Cross Country Comparisons --- p.25 / Chapter 1. --- Proportion to pay dividends --- p.25 / Chapter 2. --- Long-term loan --- p.28 / Chapter 3. --- Regressions --- p.30 / Chapter III --- Conclusion --- p.33 / References --- p.34 / Appendix --- p.37

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.