Abstract
We analyze the one- to five-year post-announcement stock performance of firms that either initiate cash dividends or resume the payment of cash dividends after a hiatus in payments. Both the event-window and long-run abnormal stock returns are significantly positive, suggesting that the market initially underreacts to the typical firm's dividend announcement. This result also holds for subsets of the 1927 to 1998 time period, suggesting that the observed anomaly is persistent across time and is neither merely a result of data mining nor driven by an ephemeral phenomenon that is confined to a particular time period. Firms that have positive abnormal returns during the announcement period are shown to have the highest post-announcement abnormal returns. A naive investment strategy of establishing long and short positions on firms that experience positive and negative announcement period abnormal returns, respectively, produces persistent positive abnormal returns across the entire 1927-1998 sample period.
Published Version
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