An empirical investigation on the effects of asymmetric information and growth opportunities on dividend polices: A case study of private Iranian banks

Dividend plays an important role on changing profitability in any business units including banking industry. In this paper, we present an empirical survey to study the effect of asymmetric information and growth opportunities on dividend policies among some private banks in Iran. The proposed study of this paper gathers the necessary information from all private banks whose shares are listed in Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2005-2011. The study uses regression analysis to study the effects of various factors where dividend distribution policy is considered as a function of four independent variables namely spread, bank size, growth opportunity and cash flow. The results of the survey indicate that there are some positive and meaningful relationships between growth opportunity and dividend pay (0.003308), between bank size and dividend pay (0.019497) and between bank size and dividend pay (0.168821).