DETERMINANTS OF DIVIDEND POLICY : EVIDENCE FROM MALASYIA

The purpose of this paper is to study the financial factors that determine the dividend policy of companies listed on the Bursa Malaysia by considering the variables such as profitability, firm size, risk, leverage, liquidity, and growth opportunities on the dividends per share of 126 listed companies on Bursa Malaysia ranging from 2003 to 2012. The balanced panel data is used to run the regression. There is only firms size have the significant positively relationship with dividends per share. Variables such as firm size, liquidity and growth opportunities of firms had shown a positive relationship towards dividend per share. On the other hand, variables like profitability, risk and leverage had shown negative relationship towards dividend per share. The variability of this empirical model is 6.15%. This means that the movements of selected variables in this empirical model are only able to explained 6.15% of the movement of dividend per share