Principal–principal agency conflicts, product market competition and corporate payout policy in China

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the interaction between competition and corporate payout policy and more specifically to answer the question that whether competition mitigates the principal–principal agency conflicts and influences firms to distribute dividends to shareholders in Chinese corporations. Design/methodology/approach This research models measures of competition with scaled measures of dividends and analyzes a sample of 16,730 firm-year observations from Chinese-listed manufacturing firms for the period spanning 2003 to 2016. Further, this research uses the Tobit model (a censored regression) to empirically test the proposed hypotheses. Findings This research finds that intense competition not only mitigates agency problems and forces firms to disgorge cash but also increases a firm’s likelihood to pay dividends and weakens the negative association between agency conflicts and dividends. Practical implications The results show an important policy implication for the industry. As the principal–principal agency conflict restrains the dividends, the regulatory authorities could encourage a competitive environment and a more diverse ownership structure to induce a higher dividend rate and protect the minority shareholders. In addition, this study also has implications for other emerging markets characterized by concentrated ownership and principal–principal agency problems. Originality/value This study adds to the literature related to the disciplinary role of competition and identifies competition as a significant determinant of corporate payout policy. Furthermore, this research extends earlier research on corporate payout decisions that besides firm-level corporate governance and country-level legal system, industry-level competition also influences corporate payout decisions, significantly.