Dividend policy is one of the most important areas in finance literature. Many researchers have studied why firms pay a
substantial portion of their earnings as dividends if, according to Miller and Modigliani’s (1961) dividend irrelevance
proposition, dividend policy does not change shareholders’ wealth. This is known as ‘dividend puzzle’ in finance
literature (Black, 1976). One explanation is that dividends help address agency problems between managers and outside
investors. In Easterbrook’s (1984) analysis, the monitoring role of dividends mitigates agency conflicts between
managers and shareholders. The agency problem in Jensen’s (1986) analysis arises from managers’ incentives to
consume private benefits, e.g., building their empires by investing free cash flows in negative net present value projects
or spending cash on perquisites. Thus, dividends alleviate this problem by reducing free cash flows available to
manager