Do managers really care about shareholders’ expectations? Evidence on dividend smoothing on Latin American emerging stock markets

The main goal of the paper is to examine dividend smoothing behaviour among companies listed on the stock markets in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru in the period of 1994-2015. The research sample consisted of 227 companies and 4968 observations. On the basis of Lintner’s dividend partial adjustment model, we calculated the speed of dividend adjustment (SOA) in response to the change in earnings. We found many companies with low SOA values, which on the grounds of the classic Linter’s approach implies the existence of dividend smoothing. However, the obtained average SOA values varied in four out of five analyzed stock markets from 0.731 for Chile to 0.914 for Brazil.This means that on selected emerging stock markets of Latin America – except Peru – the dividend smoothing has not been confirmed. Moreover, the obtained SOA levels varied among the selected stock markets, which implies that the differences in the speed of dividend adjustment may be driven by either national or stock markets characteristics.