Unlocking Dividend Potential Through the Power of Sustainable Disclosures: Moderating Role of Financial Constraints

Abstract

Based on signalling and stakeholder theory, this research empirically explores the relationship between sustainability disclosure by firms and their dividend payouts in emerging economies. Various measures such as likelihood of paying dividends, stability of dividend disbursed, dividend payout ratio and dividend yield are employed to test the research hypotheses. Panel dataset covering firms from 16 emerging economies spanning from 2015 to 2022 is analysed using Logit model, Tobit model and Random Effect model. The findings demonstrate a favourable relationship between ESG disclosure scores and dividend payouts of firms. Higher ESG scores are associated with a greater likelihood of paying dividends, higher dividend payments, ensuring the stability of these payments and delivering higher implied shareholder returns through dividend yield. These effects are more pronounced for firms under greater financial constraints. Importantly, these results remain robust across various sensitivity analyses involving alternative measures, estimation methods and instrumental variable regression. These findings hold implications for investors, managers and policymakers, offering valuable insights for companies to structure their sustainability initiatives. By examining and integrating corporate finance and sustainability, this study introduces ESG scores as a novel nonfinancial driver of corporate payouts, thus marking the pioneering contribution to the ESG‐dividend literature in emerging nations.