Contemporaneous Announcements of Dividends and Earnings

Abstract

The information content of dividends is well documented in the literature. The marginal information content of dividends in the presence of contemporaneous earnings announcements, however, is ambiguous empirically and theoretically. This paper documents that quarterly dividend announcements convey information beyond that contained in contemporaneous quarterly earnings announcements. Earnings provide information beyond that provided by dividends regardless of the type of information in the dividend announcement, but especially when dividends and earnings provide consistent information or when dividends provide no information. The marginal information content of dividends, however, appears to be a result from the subsample of observations for which earnings indicate “favorable” news about the firm and dividends contemporaneously indicate “unfavorable” news. Dividends convey little, if any, information that is not already conveyed in contemporaneous earnings for other subsamples of firms.