ویژگی های مالی از شرکت های سود سهام پرداخت در صنعت مهمان نوازی: تجزیه و تحلیل رگرسیون لجستیک

The purpose of this study was to identify the financial features that distinguish dividend-paying firms from non-dividend-paying companies in the U.S. hospitality industry. The logistic regression model shows that firm size and profitability are significant drivers of dividend payout, whereas investment opportunities deter dividend payout. In the U.S. hospitality industry, larger hospitality firms with higher profitability but fewer investment opportunities are more likely to pay out dividends to their shareholders.

Gordon's (1959) dividend relevance theory suggests that investors consider current dividends to be less risky than future dividends or capital gains, indicating that paying dividends at present has a positive impact on firm value. More recently, Gitman and Madura (2001) and Van Horne and Wachowicz (2001) posited that paying out dividends can reduce investors’ uncertainty, causing them to discount the firm's earnings at a lower required rate of return and hence increase the stock value. Conversely, if the firm reduces or stops paying dividends, investors’ uncertainty will increase, thus raising their required rate of return and lowering the stock value. Many research studies (Cornell and Shapiro, 1987, Peterson and Branesh, 1983, Prezas, 1988 and Ravid, 1988) have found that dividend policy can affect the firm value via its interactions with investment and financing policies. In particular, Gitman and Madura (2001) observed that, in practice, both managers and stockholders tend to support the belief that firm dividend policy indeed affects stock prices. Since the dividend relevance theory (Gordon, 1959) was first proposed, numerous studies (Alli et al., 1993, Amidu and Abor, 2006, Chen and Steiner, 1999, Dickens et al., 2003, Holder et al., 1998, Jensen et al., 1992, Omran and Pointon, 2004, Ooi, 2001 and Zeng, 2003) have investigated the factors that affect the levels of dividends paid. On the other hand, some studies have concentrated on the financial characteristics of dividend-paying firms or factors that affect the dividend payout decision itself rather than levels of dividends (Fama and French, 2001 and Mancinelli and Ozkan, 2006). In the hospitality industry, while some firms pay dividends to their shareholders, many other firms distribute no dividends at all. What are the particular financial features of those dividend-paying hospitality firms, and what are the reasons for hospitality firms’ decisions to distribute or not to distribute dividends? While the corporate dividend payout decision has been widely examined in the general finance literature, it is a thinly investigated area in hospitality financial management. The hospitality finance literature contains reports of studies on the information signaling value of dividends (Canina et al., 2001) and the impact of dividend initiation or dividend increase on hospitality stock investment return (Sheel, 1998, Borde et al., 1999 and Sheel and Zhong, 2005). However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has been conducted to investigate the financial characteristics of dividend-paying hospitality firms. According to Fama and French (2001), at the time of their study, the proportion of U.S. firms paying dividends was around 21%. However, the COMPUSTAT database (2005) showed that about 41% of U.S. hospitality firms distributed dividends. The much higher proportion of dividend-paying firms in the hospitality industry suggests that hospitality firms’ dividend policy may have some unique features that deserve our investigation. Following the studies by Fama and French (2001) and Mancinelli and Ozkan (2006), this study attempted to identify financial features that distinguish dividend-paying hospitality firms from their non-dividend-paying counterparts, thus determining factors that affect hospitality firms’ dividend payout decisions. Those financial features, if identified, will shed light on the drivers behind hospitality firms’ dividend payout decisions. The findings should help hospitality researchers to better understand why some hospitality firms pay dividends while other firms distribute no dividends and why hospitality firms are more prone to dividend distributions than U.S. corporations in general, thus enriching the hospitality finance literature from the dividend policy perspective. On a practical basis, our findings may assist pro-dividends investors and portfolio managers to identify hospitality companies that have the potential to pay out dividends, better suiting their needs for hospitality investment.

This study attempted to identify the financial features that distinguish dividend-paying firms from non-dividend-paying companies in the hospitality industry. It examined eight variables – firm size, liquidity, investment opportunities, profitability, debt leverage, growth, earnings variability, and sector dummy – to determine if they play a significant role in hospitality firms’ dividend payout decisions. A logistic regression model was estimated and three variables – TA, MTBVR, and ROA – were identified as significant financial features that can differentiate dividend-paying from non-dividend-paying firms in the hospitality industry. The estimated logistic regression model showed that large and profitable firms with fewer investment opportunities are more likely to pay out dividends. Small and less profitable firms with more investment opportunities are less likely to distribute dividends. Our findings could help explain why some hospitality firms pay dividends while other firms distribute no dividends. Large hospitality firms may have reached a mature stage with few new investment opportunities. Therefore, when they are profitable, they tend to distribute the profits, at least partially, as dividends. On the other hand, small hospitality firms are likely in their early growth stage with many new investment opportunities. They need to keep profits, if any, within the firms as retained earnings for new investments and hence they are less likely to pay out dividends. Especially, the investment opportunities may well explain why most of casino hotels in our sample did not pay out dividends. In our sample, while 41% of the sample firms had dividend payouts, only 13% of casino hotels paid out dividends. Over the past decade (1996–2007), U.S. casino hotels have grown significantly with an average annual revenue growth rate of 12.50% (Upneja et al., 2000 and Price Waterhouse Cooppers, 2007). According to a report published by American Gaming Association (2008), U.S. casino industry is offering positive investment opportunities for investors because compliance with regulations and taxation makes the industry's business dealings completely transparent. Also, the many U.S. casino hotels are growing by pursuing investment opportunities in emerging foreign markets such as Macau and Singapore. The good investment opportunities of U.S. casino hotels make them less likely to distribute dividends in the future. With regard to the importance of investment opportunities in dividend payout decisions, our findings may also provide some clue to why hospitality firms are more likely to distribute dividends as compared to companies in the U.S. in general. The market-to-book value ratios of the U.S. restaurant and hotel industries, an indicator of investment opportunities, are 2.30 and 1.84 at present compared with 4.86 of the overall market represented by S&P 500 (Reuters, 2008). Hospitality firms are more likely to payout dividends probably due to their relatively fewer investment opportunities as compared with U.S. firms in general. Of course, a thorough ratios’ comparison between the hospitality industry and non-hospitality industries is needed before final conclusions can be drawn on the issue and this could be the task for a follow-up research study. Size, investment opportunities, and profitability are significant factors affecting dividend payout decisions in the hospitality industry. As revealed in this study, their impacts on the dividend payout decisions are consistent with findings for other industries in earlier studies. Unlike in other industries, earnings variability is not a significant financial feature differentiating dividend-paying and non-dividend-paying firms in the hospitality industry. Investors and portfolio managers looking for hospitality firms with good dividend-paying potentials need to pay more attention to other financial features, such as size, investment opportunities, and profitability of hospitality firms to identify targets. Large hospitality firms are inclined to pay out dividends because they have easier and more cost-effective access to the capital market than do small firms, thus reducing their dependence on internal financing (Holder et al., 1998). Their lower reliance on internal financing should motivate them to pay out dividends. In contrast, small hospitality firms’ less favorable access to the capital market makes internal financing more important, thus deterring them from dividend distributions. Hospitality firms with greater investment opportunities tend not to pay dividends because they need to conserve cash to fund opportunities. To ensure a firm's ability to finance investment opportunities, retaining earnings as internal equity is preferable to raising funds externally due to the expensive flotation costs associated with raising external funds (Holder et al., 1998) and the costs associated with information asymmetry when raising new equity in the capital market (Myers and Majluf, 1984). Finally, profitable hospitality firms have a higher probability of paying out dividends because greater earnings are available for shareholders (Myers and Majluf, 1984). Also, firms with good earnings can generate large cash flows from operations and therefore may intend to pay out dividends (Dickens et al., 2003). Profitable hospitality firms are likely to have more operation-generated cash flows to back up dividend payouts. In the event of few investment opportunities, the likelihood of paying out dividends increases. A limitation of this study is its use of cross-sectional only one year of data to examine the factors that may affect dividend payout decisions while using single-year data can help controlling economic or market cycle effects, if any, on dividend payout decisions, it limits the number of observations for the sample. Use of a cross-time sample, called panel data, could significantly increase samples size, thus making the findings more reflective of the reality of dividend payout decisions in the hospitality industry in the long run. Future research may consider using several years of data to enlarge the sample size. In the meantime, new variables will need to be created to control for the impact of economic or market cycle on dividend payouts. With a cross-time sample that contains more observations, classification accuracy and the predictive power of the logistic regression model may improve further. Train (2003) documents that the standard logistic regression model, which was employed by this study, has the following three limitations: (1) it cannot represent random taste variation; (2) it exhibits restrictive substitution patterns due to the independence from irrelevant alternatives (IIA) property; (3) it cannot be used with panel data when unobserved factors are correlated over time. While this study uses observations in one year rather than panel data and thus can avoid the problem of overtime correlation of unobserved factors, it may still be subject to first two limitations as presented by Train (2003). Therefore, future studies may use more flexible discrete choice models such as the probit regression and mixed logistic regression, which are free from the three limitations of the standard logistic regression, when further examining the factors affecting hospitality firms’ dividend payout decisions, especially if panel data is to be used. This study examined only the factors affecting hospitality firms’ decisions to pay or not to pay dividends. To gain a more thorough understanding of hospitality firms’ dividend policy, it is necessary to identify not only the financial characteristics of dividend-paying firms, but also those factors affecting the amounts of dividends paid out. Therefore, future studies should investigate the factors that influence levels of dividends, thereby helping to establish a more comprehensive understanding of hospitality firm dividend policy.