Disaggregating ‘accounting earnings’ to better explain UK dividends

Abstract

The aim of our article is to investigate whether corporate cash flow and accruals data have a role to play in explaining dividends for a sample of nonfinancial UK firms between 1994 and 2004. We employ a cash flow variant of Lintner's (1956) dividend model similar to those used in prior research such as Brittain (1964) and Simons (1994). However, we examine the role of cash flows together with long- and short-term accruals components of ‘accounting earnings’. Several studies have shown that disaggregated earnings components have greater explanatory power for future cash flows than either current cash flows or earnings data (Barth et al., 2001; Al-Attar and Hussain, 2004). We find similar explanatory gains within the Lintner model framework for dividends.