Effect of Dividend Decisions on Market Performance of Share Prices for Commercial Banks Listed at Nairobi Securities Exchange

Abstract

Dividend decisions are the approaches undertaken by the management of an organization to facilitate proper allocation of the cash flows from the business activities. They provide reasonable guidelines for the organization's actions based on the satisfaction of the investors' interests and organizational objectives. They strive to achieve the goals while they seek substantial profitability of the organization. The majority of the studies involving dividend decisions focused on determining the necessity for dividend policies in an organization. Others focused on assessing the Influence of the dividend policies on the stock return of the firm. Therefore, this study investigated the effects of dividend decisions on market performance of share prices for commercial banks listed at Nairobi Stock Exchange. The specific objective is; To determine the impact of dividend payouts on the stock performance of the commercial banks listed at Nairobi Stock Exchange The independent variables in the study is dividend payouts. The dependent variable was the performance of share prices for commercial banks listed at Nairobi Stock Exchange. The theoretical review included the bird in hand theory, information signaling theory, and tax differential theory. The research used a descriptive research design approach for 12 commercial banks' target population in Kenya. The study used secondary sources to collect data, which are the bank's annual data published on the Nairobi Stock Exchange website. The research used the SPSS software for analyzing the collected data. The results show that the constant dividend pay-out ratio and residual dividend policy are the major determinants of market performance of share prices. Discretional dividend policy does not significantly influence market performance of share prices of commercial banks. The study recommends the commercial banks to constantly make proper dividend decisions to ensure good market performance of the share prices.