The Dividend Expectations Impact on the Largest Russian Companies Share Price

This paper examines how the investor’s dividend expectations influence the share prices of largest Russian companies. It happens by the fact that the company dividend policy is one of the most significant feature that define investor’s attractiveness and, therefore, dividend policy has huge impact on the company capitalization. In order to study these facts, we use the data of the most liquid, regularly dividend paid public Russian companies and test the stated hypothesis about influence of dividend payments on share price by the event study method: each company is considering separately with the its own history of dividend payments. According to implemented analysis the hypothesis were confirmed, for instance, the first dividend payment always has positive significant impact on the share price. As a result, it allows us to develop the mechanism for managing dividend expectations of shareholders. This result is in line with Wooldrige (1983), Fuller (2003) and Amihud and Lim (2006) however this paper is the first one that focused on the Russian market.