Payments to Shareholders and their Impact on the Investment Activity of Companies

Theme of the work: “Payments to shareholders and their impact on the investment activity of companies”. There are two main approaches to the question of the relationship between dividend payments and investment activity of enterprises. The first is that dividend payments limit the investment activity of the enterprises, while the second says that they do not affect the amount of capital that the organizations can invest in its development. Accordingly, the main goal of this work is to research payments to shareholders and their impact on the investment activity of enterprises on the basis of Russian empirical data. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that the dependence of investment activity of companies on dividend payments has not been studied fully enough and requires detailed consideration. The research methodology is the analysis of panel data. All companies were divided into two groups – enterprises of developed and developing industries, the study period was also divided into two time periods 2008–2013 and 2014–2017. What is more, in addition to the volume of dividend payments, various macroeconomic factors and internal indicators of companies were added to the model. According to the results of the analysis, it was concluded that the theory of the independence of dividends and investments is confirmed on the basis of data on large developed enterprises. Speaking of developing enterprises, it can be noted that in both periods, payments to shareholders have a negative impact on investments in domestic development.