Abstract:
To investigate 1) The dividend signaling hypothesis and 2) The role of market capitalization and trading liquidity effect on the dividend signaling efficiency. The data used in this study consists of 210 companies listed on the stock exchange of Thailand ( SET ). To be included in the dataset, the firms must pay dividends to the investors at least once during the period of study from years 2001-2007. The results show that dividends of the large and high trading liquidity firms are not related to future earnings as expected since those firms are usually more closely followed by analysts and investors. In addition, the managers have many channels to signal the firms information to investors. As a result, dividends do not convey to these firms typically future earnings. In contrast, small and low trading liquidity firms are formed to related dividends with the firms future earnings because the managers have only few channels to signal firms information to investors. Investors rarely follow the information of these firms. Consequently, the dividends of small and low trading liquidity firms are shown to be a good signal of the firms future earnings. In short, the study confirms the finding in previous studies that market capitalization and trading liquidity are negatively relate to dividend signaling efficiency.