In the signaling model of dividend, a firm's dividend policy is hypothesized to convey the information about its future prospects that is privately observed only by insiders (i.e., Miller and Rock (1985), John and Williams (1985), John and Nachman (1987), and etc.). More specifically, if insiders have exclusive access to information about the firm's future performance, then it has been suggested that insiders have an incentive to signal the firm's future performance through dividends to the market place, expecting that the market may revise its existing perception about the firm's future prospects. John and Williams (1985) have demonstrated how dividends can act as a credible signal of the fundamental earnings prospects of the firm. In practice, for dividends to be a credible signal, insider should maintain a systematic relationship between expected earnings and dividends. In this regard, Lintner (1956) found that managers smoothly adjust firms’ dividends with respect to earnings and maintain a long-run target payout ratio. Lintner’s further investigations show that most firms do not make an immediate adjustment to this target payout ratio.
Firms follow a partial adaptation process making a gradual dividend adjustment to the target ratio if current payout is deviated from the target ratio. Both the dividend smoothing and the dividend signaling hypotheses have been confirmed by a number of subsequent studies. Whereas dividend smoothing and dividend signaling are well-established empirical facts, the empirical evidences are based principally on informations collected in the US market. The dividend policies of corporations differ significantly across countries due to a variety of institutional and financial market differences. The principal objective of this study is to assess the dividend policies of firms in Korea. In particular, this study investgates whether Korean firms follow dividend policies as in developed markets in which dividend smoothing and dividend signaling become stylized facts.
Human capital is widely acknowledged as a key factor for economic performance at both the micro and macro level. Despite the fact that a large fraction of human capital accumulation takes place after the entry into the labor market, most of the existing literature that investigates the returns to investment in human capital has focused on education, due to measurement problems and data availability. Relatively little evidence is available, instead, on the accumulation of human capital through the lifelong training of workers and, more specifically, on the effects of training on productivity.
A number of studies have tried to fill this gap by analysing the impact of training on productivity using firm-level data. However, this literature does not provide a consistent picture, as the lack of longitudinal data has generally made it difficult to control for unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity of training (e.g. Bartel, 1994, Bishop, 1994, Black and Lynch, 1996, Barrett and O’Connell, 2001). Some recent studies have tackled this problem by focusing on panel data at industry-level (e.g. Dearden et al., 2006, Conti, 2005). This approach, however, does not allow to estimate the private returns to training, as analyses based on industry-level data also capture spillover effects between firms. There exists a recent literature that investigates the effects of training on productivity using firm-level panel data, but it is generally hampered either by the specificity of the sample (e.g. Almeida and Carneiro, 2006), or by the limited number of observations in the sectional dimension (Ballot et al., 2006; Zwick, 2005, 2006) or in the time dimension (Black and Lynch, 2001).
In many respects, Nigeria represents a paradox in development. Take for instance, Nigeria is the seventh world largest exporter of oil, yet ranks 158 out of the 188 countries of the would in terms of quality of life (UNDP, 2007). Available statistics indicate that poverty has become endemic in Nigeria and is on the increase. For instance, poverty increased from 18 million people in 1980, to 35 million people in 1985; 39 million people in 1992; 67 people in 1996; and 74 million people in 1999. At present, about two-third of the Nigeria’s population (about 150 million) are poor. The latest Human Development Programme indicates that 70.8 per cent and 92.4 per cent of Nigerian population live below US$1 (N117) and US$2 (N234) a day respectively (UNDP, 2007). All these support the ranking of Nigeria among the world’s least developed nations of the world (UNDP, 2007).
Out of these numbers of poor Nigerian, women represent greater proportion due largely to their ascribed and acquired role, which is accentuated by sociocultural orthodoxy with a concomitant vulnerability to deprivation, intimidation, and extreme suffering. Consequent upon this, majority of these women are forced into the informal economy, which exacerbate poverty and vulnerability. Given the multidimensional role of women in the Nigerian culture, and by implication in the development process though not often acknowledged, the continued neglect of the women in Nigeria means postponing economic recovery in the country.
