An empirical investigation of determinants of firm dividend payouts in Egypt: An agency perspective

Abstract

This empirical study aims primarily to examine determinants of the firm dividend payouts (FDP). A number of independent variables namely ownership concentration, institutional shareholding, firm cash flows, investment opportunity, firm growth and firm risk are used as determinants of the FDP of the most active firms listed on the Egyptian Exchange (EGX) after statistically controlling for four control variables which are firm profitability, firm leverage, firm industry and firm size. This investigation uses a sample of 408 firm-year observations during a three-year period (2015-2017). Pearson correlation and hierarchical multiple regression are employed to investigate the impact of the independent variables on FDP. Descriptive statistics shows that across the sampled firms over the three years, the average FDP is 7.6%. Further, excessive variation in the FDP is found across sampled firms over the time period. A number of significant relations between FDP and three independent variables (ownership concentration, institutional shareholding and firm growth) are found. HMR finding support results obtained from Pearson correlation.