INTRODUCTION Prior research on whether dividends are informative about current and future earnings tends
to focus on whether dividend changes are followed by earnings changes and stock price
reactions in the same direction e.g., Watts 1973; Healy and Palepu 1988; Benartzi et al.
1997; Nissim and Ziv 2001; Grullon et al. 2002; Grullon et al. 2005. Some recent studies have
started to examine whether dividend paying status itself, rather than changes in dividends, provide
information about current and future earnings. Instead of attempting to explain whether and how
stock price changes and future earnings changes are associated with dividends, these studies
simply investigate whether dividend paying status provides some information about earnings e.g.,
Caskey and Hanlon 2005; Hanlon et al. 2007; Skinner and Soltes 2010.
In this paper, we examine whether dividend paying status per se provides information about
one aspect of earnings—the quality of earnings. We do so by investigating the association between
proxies for earnings quality and dividend paying status. We document that, relative to nondividend
paying firms, dividend paying firms have 1 lower absolute values of discretionary
accruals; 2 lower standard deviation and absolute magnitude of the errors associated with the
mapping of accruals into cash flows; and 3 more value relevant earnings. We also find that the
evidence on the positive association between dividend paying status and earnings quality is stronger
weaker for firms that pay larger smaller dividends. Overall, our results provide descriptive
evidence that dividend paying status is associated with better earnings quality.
In additional analyses, we examine share repurchases and find repurchases are also associated
with better earnings quality. Specifically, compared to firms without repurchases, firms with repurchases
have lower standard deviation and absolute magnitude of the errors associated with the