In addition, it is found that higher foreign ownership is associated with lower dividend payouts. The contributions of this paper to the existing literature are
as follows. First, this paper helps shed additional light on dividend policy of listed firms in China, where the
research on payout policy is still unexplored. Second, the evidence from this paper showing the positive impact
of government ownership on dividend policies of Chinese firms helps corroborate the findings of prior work
(i.e., Chen et al., 2009; Bradford et al., 2013). Third, this paper documents an interesting issue regarding
corporate governance of Chinese listed firms, i.e., the institutional ownership has a negative impact on dividend
policy of Chinese firms, suggesting that large institutional investors expropriate minority shareholders.