consistent with baker and wurgler (2004a,b)ม the dividend premium is calculated as the difference in the logs of the valueweighted average market-to-book ratios of payers and non-payers to ensure that the dividend premiums are computed based on a minimum number of companies, we require that there are at least ten payers and ten non-payers in a given country for each year for which we compute the dividend premium. for some countrise,the above requirement of a minimum number of payers is met in some of our sample years but not others. we restrict our sample to only those coutries for which the requitement is met in at least five years out of the 9-years period of 1996-2004 used in our regression analyses. these observations are drawn from a sample of 23 countries. after allowing for further eliminations due to missing accounting and financial variables used in our subsequent empirical analysis, the final sample consists of 24,298 firm-year observations.