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Dividend, Investment and Financing Decisions: Empirical Evidence on French Firms

The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically the dividend, investment, and financing decisions of French firms. A basic premise of the study is that increased perspective in business finance can be gained through better understanding of the financial behavior of companies outside one's domestic economy. While the literature of finance and economics includes many significant empirical studies based on dividend, investment, and financing data on American firms, the body of evidence on continental European firms is still relatively small, owing in large part to the difficulties encountered in gathering meaningful financial data on individual firms. In order to examine for the first time the relationship of dividend and investment decisions in France, using well-known models of financial bahavior, we were able to obtain annual data on a sample of French companies over a seven-year period. Our intent is to add to the understanding of the robustness of these models by demonstrating their empirical validity in Europe and to report several differences from previous empirical findings for American firms.