Does Market Competition Discipline Dividend Policy?
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Sohn Pan-Do , Song Young-Su , Choi Lim-Gun 
Published: June 2018

This paper investigates whether market competition disciplines firm’s dividend policy and also there is the interaction effect of market competition in terms of agency problem and firm size using sample data listed in KOSPI over 1981 to 2013. Recent studies find the evidence that market competition in industry disciplines firm’s dividend policy. It is possible that product market interaction between market competition and agency conflicts may be an important determinant of the decision to pay out excess cash to shareholders. La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer and Vishny (2000) argue that product market competition can potentially have too opposing effect on payout policies. One possibility is that firms pay dividends because competition acts as an enforcement mechanism that exerts pressure on managers to distribute cash to their shareholders by increasing the risk and the cost of overinvesting. Allen and Gale(2000) suggest that market competition among firms may be a more effective corporate governance mechanism either the market for corporate control or monitoring by institutions.
This evidence is explained in three hypotheses, which are an outcome effect hypothesis, substitution effect hypothesis, and predatory risk hypothesis. Outcome hypothesis suggests that overinvestment and management failure due to of discipline of market competition in industry induce the higher dividend payout propensity to firm. Also this hypothesis documents that firm with large free cash flow in higher industry concentration due to agency conflict between manager and shareholder has lower dividend propensity.
The substitution effect hypothesis suggests that dividend policy is substituted by market competition and firm in higher industry concentration has propensity of higher dividend payout. Also firm with higher free cash flow in more industry concentration has higher dividend policy. Predatory risk hypothesis documents that firm with more cash has potential predatory risk from rival firms and this risk does not have power in competitive market and then firm in more industry concentration is more likely to have lower dividend payout.
Additionally this effect is large in small firm. According to these hypotheses, we test three hypotheses using industry concentration as proxy for market competition and we find as follows. Using a large sample of manufacturing firms listed in KOSPI market, we test the linkage between market competition and dividend policy by using the regression technique with firm and time fixed effect and also Tobit regression.
We find that firms in less competitive industries pay more dividends than firms in more competitive markets. Furthermore, inconsistent with agency theory, we find that there is no interaction effect between market competition and free cash flow. Additionally, we find the evidence that there is interaction effect between market competition and firm size (small firm), which is consistent with predatory risk hypothesis. Overall, our findings are consistent with the idea that the disciplinary forces of market competition induce managers to pay out dividend and these evidences are a key implication to firm managers and stakeholders.