【文章內容簡介】 y conflicts, shareholders can be confident enough that the firm’s cash flows are properly used. Hence, the higher dividend payout advocated by Easterbrook (1984) does not appear to be essential to disciplining management.Consistent with this view, Jensen et al. (1992) show that insider ownership is associated with significantly lower dividend payout among US firms. Farinha (2003) documents a similar negative relationship in the UK. Chen et al. (2005) provide evidence that some indicators of governance quality (existence of audit mittee and percentage of independent directors) negatively affect dividend payouts in Hong Kong. These studies strongly suggest that the higher alignment of interest between managers as agents and shareholders as principals should actually result in lower dividend payments.What39。s more, agency theory has recently highlighted possible conflicts between large and small shareholders. Shleifer and Vishny (1997) emphasize that large shareholders prefer to generate private benefits of control that are not shared by minority shareholders. Johnson et al. (2000) give several examples of controlling shareholders expropriating minority shareholders of profitable business opportunities. Claessens and Djankov (1999) explain downwardsloping firm value at high levels of ownership concentration by the potential risk of expropriation by controlling shareholders.Gugler and Yurtoglu (2003) show that the lower dividend payout of majoritycontrolled firms in Germany is related to the probability that controlling shareholders extract private benefits at the expense of minority shareholders. Indeed, they find that increases in dividend payments are associated with significantly positive abnormal returns among firms where rent extraction is most likely given the discrepancy between cash flow rights and control rights. Furthermore, the presence of a second large shareholder contributes to increase the distribution of profits, as it decreases the scope of expropriation.Maury and Pajuste (2002) document a similar negative association between ownership concentration and dividend payments in Finland, as well as evidence of the mitigating role of another large shareholder.In a similar way, we can hypothesize that firms with concentrated ownership are associated with lower dividend payments.Ownership concentration and dividend payoutIn this section, we examine the effect of ownership concentration on dividend payout controlling for other firm characteristics that could influence payout policy.Table 3 show that the coefficients on the Herfindhal index (LHH) and its associated dummy (Q2H) are both significantly negative. The coefficient on Q2H for the dividend payout ratio is less negative than the % in university analysis。 but the coefficient for dividend yield is more negative. The difference in dividend payment as proportion of equity is seen to be about 10% across the two groups.These results do not support the role of dividends as substitute for shareholder monitoring suggested by Easterbrook (1984). In fact, firms with concentrated ownership, which are more likely to be closely monitored, actually distribute lower dividends. This pattern is more consistent with the claim by Shleifer and Vishny (1997) that dominant shareholders prefer to extract private benefits, such as synergies with other controlled entities, rather than receive dividends that equally benefit minority shareholders.The results are consistent with Gugler and Yurtoglu (2003) who report that majority controlled in Germany have lower payouts. Maury and Pajuste (2002) also find that the cumula