ABSTRACTIn contrast to the disappearing dividends view prevalent in the literature, we document extensive dividend payments by firms and significant variability within firms and across 16 countries during 2000–2013. We predict that within-firm variability in dividends increases investor demand for forward-looking dividend information, and analysts respond by producing informative dividend forecasts. We find that analyst dividend forecasts are available for most dividend-paying firms and are more prevalent for firms with higher variability of dividends. Analyst dividend forecasts are more accurate than alternative proxies based on extrapolations of past dividends. Finally, dividend forecasts (1) are incrementally useful to investors beyond information in other fundamentals, such as earnings and cash flow forecasts, (2) help investors interpret earnings quality, and (3) are associated with investors' portfolio allocation decisions.Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

中文翻译：

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分析师股息预测及其对投资者的用处


摘要与文献中普遍存在的股息消失观点相反，我们记录了 2000 年至 2013 年期间公司的广泛股息支付以及公司内部和 16 个国家的显着变化。我们预测，公司内部股息的变化会增加投资者对前瞻性股息信息的需求，而分析师会通过提供信息丰富的股息预测来做出回应。我们发现，分析师的股息预测适用于大多数支付股息的公司，并且对于股息波动较大的公司来说更为普遍。分析师的股息预测比基于过去股息推断的替代指标更准确。最后，股息预测 (1) 除了其他基本面信息（例如收益和现金流预测）之外，对投资者的作用越来越大，(2) 帮助投资者解释收益质量，(3) 与投资者的投资组合配置决策相关。数据可用性：数据可从文中引用的公共来源获得。