Il modo in cui le aziende restituiscono i loro dividendi è motivo di interesse per molti trader e ricercatori accademici. L'obiettivo di questo articolo è mostrare come il quantative easying ed il livello di leva aziendale influiscano sulla politica dei dividendi delle imprese. Il nostro principale interesse riguarda la possibile relazione tra il debito finanziario lordo in rapporto all’Ebitda ed il dividendo. In questo studio consideriamo 10 società quotate italiane (sia pubbliche che private) di settori diversi e non correlati. Considerando un periodo di quattro anni (2012-2015), dopo il famoso “Whatever it takes” del Presidente Draghi, testiamo la nostra ipotesi attraverso una regressione a panel data. I risultati non evidenziano una relazione significativa tra livello di indebitamento e rapporto di distribuzione dei dividendi ed evidenziano potenzialmente il ruolo cruciale dei Consigli di Amministrazione nella gestione delle scelte dei dividendi.

Sommario: 1. Introduction. – 2. Literature review. – 3. The crisis in the Eurozone: a brief introduction of measures taken by the ECB during and after the crisis. – 4. Panel Data Models. – 5. The Model. – 6. Research findings. – 7. Conclusion. 1. Introduction Nowadays, the understanding of firms’ dividend policy, with its forecast, is a reason of life for many equity analysts, traders and business researchers. Dividends are not only a significant way to satisfy shareholders, but are also, in most cases, the direct mirror of companies’ financial stability and strength. In financial markets there are investors who are dividend seeker, picking companies with aggressive dividend policy. This reflects the thought of the American financial writer Richard Russel: «A stock dividend is something tangible — it’s not an earnings projection; it’s something solid, in hand. A stock dividend is a true return on the investment. Everything else is hope and speculation». On the back of this perspective, dividends are vectors useful to forecast stock market evolution. In order to carry out their valuation, equity analysts use a wide set of ratios, such as: free cash flow to equity, dividend coverage ratio and dividend payout ratio. As there are many markets worldwide, finding a unique variable able to significantly explain board of directors decisions would be difficult. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to investigate whether in the Italian stock market, during an important economic turmoil, there is a clear relationship between high level of gross leverage and dividend policy. 2. Literature review One of the most important target of any corporate is to generate enough cash to cover forward-looking investments and then distribute dividends. The latter are split into two main families: 1) Cash dividends and 2) Stock dividends. 1) A common way for firms to get back capital to their shareholders are dividends in the form of periodic cash payments, named Cash dividends. Although many firms pay regular dividends, there are special events (i.e. legal settlements or borrowing money to make large one-time cash distributions) in which cash dividends are distributed. Each company lays down its own dividend policy and periodically evaluate if a positive or negative review (decreasing or increasing the dividend for the current year) is warranted. Usually, Cash dividends are paid on a per-share basis. 2) There are occasions in which on the top of cash dividends distribution, an additional distribution of shares occurs: we call this share dividends. We see this type of dividends when a company is keen to please its investors but either does not have the cash to distribute or it wants to keep as long as possible its existing liquidity for other investments. Main advantage of Stock dividends in some countries (not in Italy, though) is the different fiscal treatment: they are not [continua..]