【正文】 cent. Therefore, wealthy investors might prefer to have panies retain and plow earnings back into the business. Earnings growth would presumably lead to stock prices increases, and thus low taxed capital gains would be substituted for highertaxed dividends. (2)Taxes are not paid on the gains until a stock is sold. Due to time value effects, a dollar of taxes paid in the future has a lower effective cost than a dollar paid today. (3) If a stock is held by someone until he or she dies, no capital gains tax is due at allthe beneficiaries who receive the stock can use the stock’s value on the death day as their cost basis and thus pletely escape the capital gains tax. Because of these tax advantages, investors may prefer to have panies retain most of their earnings. IF so, investors would be willing to pay more for lowpayout panies than for otherwise similar high payout panies. There three theories offer contradictory advice to corporate managers, so which, if any, should we believe? The most logical way to proceed is to test the theories empirically. Many such tests have been conducted, but their results have been unclear. There are two reasons for this(1)For a valid statistical test, things other than dividend policy must be held constant。 that is, the sample panies must differ only in their dividend policies, and(2)we must be able to measure with a high degree of accuracy each firm’s cost of equity. Neither of these two conditions holds: We cannot find a set of publicly owned firms that differ only in their dividend policies, nor can we obtain precise estimates of the cost of equity. Therefore, no one can establish a clear relationship between dividend policy and the cost of equity. Investors in the aggregate cannot be seen to uniformly prefer either higher or lower dividends. Nevertheless, individual investors do have strong preferences. Some prefer high dividends, while others prefer all capital gains. These differences among in dividends help explain why it is difficult to reach any definitive conclusions regarding the optimal dividend payout. Even so ,both evidence and logic suggest that investors prefer firms that follow a stable, predictable dividend policy. Because we discuss how dividend policy is set in practice, we must examine two other theoretical issues that could affect our view toward dividend policy: (1)the information content, or signaling, hypothesis and(2) The clientele effects. MM argued that investors’ reactions to change in dividend policy do not necessarily show that investors prefer dividends to retained earnings. Rather, they argued that price change following dividend actions simply indicate that there is an important information, or signaling, content in dividend announcements. The clientele effects to the extent that stockholders can switch, a firm can change from one dividend payout policy to another and then let stockholders who do not like the new policy sell to other investors who do. However, frequent switching would be inefficient because of(1)brokerage costs,(2)the likelihood that stockholders who are selling will have to pay capital gains taxes, and (3) a possible shortage of investors who like the firm’s newly adopted dividend policy. Thus, management should be hesitant to change its dividend policy, because a change might cause current stockholders to sell their stock, forcing the stock price down