Shareholder payouts across time and space:
comparative analysis of corporate financialization
Diliara Valeeva, Tobias Klinge, Manuel Aalbers
SASE | 20-22 July 2023
Perspectives on corporate financialization
1. Accumulation-centered => how financial resources enter firms
e.g. rise in portfolio and interest income (Krippner 2005)
2. Asset-centered => how the structure of firm resources change
e.g. rise of financial assets and financial payments (Orhangazi 2008; Davis 2018)
Our contribution:
3. Payout-centered => how financial resources leave firms
Why payouts-centered perspective?
Recent studies show that there are diminishing trends with regards to the ‘financial’ character of asset structures and in the ways how revenues enter firms (Rabinovich 2019; Baker et al 2020; Soener 2020)
But shareholder payouts are on the rise, and are probably reaching critical values
There is a need for a more detailed study of shareholder payouts across time and space
What are the differences in shareholder payouts among different sectors, countries, and firm sizes?
Data
Refinitiv Eikon dataset
37 OECD countries, 2000-2019
37,756 firms
Cash dividends and share buybacks / net sales
Dimensions: sector, geography, firm size
Financial and large firms
Corporate sectors
Geography
Summary
1 - Sector: Healthcare, high tech, mining and telecom are already comparable with finance
2 - Geography: Not limited to a small subset of large, US-American financial companies
3 - Firm size: Over-time trends of firms of different sizes are comparable
Conclusion
Arduous to disentangle these comparative dimensions, they are highly interrelated
Aimed to outline a payout-centered perspective to describe understand financialization
Shareholder value orientation (measured through distribution of payouts) is strong and on the rise across the globe
Diliara Valeeva
University of Amsterdam
@diliara_valeeva
diliaravaleeva.com