배당소득세가 기업의 배당정책에 미치는 영향 : 국가 간 비교를 중심으로

This paper examines the effects of dividend taxes on corporate dividend policy focusing on the comparison among OECD countries in order to verify whether differential taxation of dividend income against capital gains has a significant effect on the low dividend payout ratio of Korean companies. We measure dividend tax penalty, the relative taxation of dividend and capital gains income, and establish two hypothesis as follows: Hypothesis1-The higher the dividend tax penalty is, the lower(higher) a firm's dividend payout ratio(share repurchase ratio) will be, and Hypothesis2-This relation is stronger as the individual investors increase. In order to verify these hypotheses, the listed firm-year of 34 OECD nations from 2006 to 2015 are set as subjects of analysis based on the OSIRIS database. Finally, 39, 582 firm-year are selected. To resolve the endogeneity problem of dividend tax penalty, we use the fixed effects model. Consistent with this prediction, we find that the dividend payout ratio(share repurchase ratio) decreases(increases) as the dividend tax penalty increases. However, the incremental effect of the share of individual investors in the relation between the dividend tax penalty and the dividend payout ratio(share repurchase ratio) is not detected. In conclusion, this paper implies that differential taxation on dividend income can be considered as one of the causes of low dividend payout ratio of Korean companies. Thus, a proper governmental amendment of dividend taxation policy is required to improve dividend payout ratio of Korean companies.