Det ansiktslösa ägandet, en pådrivare av utdelningar?
En studie i hur det institutionella ägandet påverkar svenska börsbolags aktieutdelningar
This paper investigates the relationship between dividends and institutional and foreign ownership in Swedish firms. We use a dataset which covers the Swedish stock market over the period 1999-2009. The institutional ownership is defined as mutual funds, pension funds and insurance companies and these are analysed separately. The study confirms the expected positive relationship between the level of institutional investors in a firm and the size of dividends. We also confirm? the expected negative relationship between foreign investors and the size of dividends paid by Swedish firms. We are also able to confirm the non dividend smoothing effect by foreign investors; however we are not able to show the expected dividend smoothing effect by institutional investors. We are also able to show that mutual funds seem to be the important part of the relationship between institutional investors and the size of dividends since there is a strong relationship between them. This implies that when analysing the relationship between increased dividends and institutional investors, one could focus on mutual funds. Finally, we provide suggestions for further and deeper research into the causality between institutional ownership dividends.