Dividend policy and stock liquidity: Lessons from Central and Eastern Europe

Recent years have brought increasing attention of scholars to the effects of stock liquidity on corporate financial decisions. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between stock liquidity and firms' dividend policy. We study the effect of stock liquidity on companies' dividend policy as well as the effect of companies' dividend policy on stock liquidity. Data on all stocks listed in fourteen CEE countries in the period from 2010 up to 2020 are utilised to model the relationships. In order to reflect the multidimensionality of stock liquidity and comprehensively analyse the dividend policy - stock liquidity relationship - we utilise several liquidity measures. We have found a strong bidirectional relationship between liquidity and dividend policy. To account for the endogeneity in the regressions, we have applied several methods, including recurrent estimation, simultaneous estimation and the difference-in-differences approach. We found a strong, positive relationship between stock liquidity and dividend policy, which supports the hypothesis that stock liquidity decreases the information asymmetry between insiders and outsiders, thus producing more incentives to pay dividends. We have also found that stock liquidity is affected by a company's dividend policy, thus causing a reverse causality between these two features.