A research study submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Administration, School of Management

Research Studies Project Report (M. BA.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2004

Dividend policy has long been an issue of interest in the financial literature. To date a number of studies have been published on the determinants of dividend policy but most of them concern developed countries and don't take into account the ownership factor. It is well known that the emerging markets are quite different from developed markets in many ways and particularly on corporate ownership and control. So the existing evidence is of limited relevance in identifying the influence of ownership concentration on dividend policy in developing countries like Thailand. The major objective of this paper is precisely to identify the association between ownership structure and dividend policy in Thailand for the top 50 companies listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET 50). The results of our linear regression model show that the association is negative which suggests that widely held firms pay higher dividends. However, the research highlights that other factors such as free cash flow and firm size drive more the dividend payout than ownership. Overall our results turn out to be weakly significant and lack relevance to extend our findings to all Thai listed films.