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Stock Splits and Cash Flows: A New Test of the Signaling Hypothesis

Julie Fitzpatrick and Tai David Yi

The BRC Academy Journal of Business

Volume 8

Number 1

Print ISSN: 2152-873X Online ISSN: 2152-873X

Date: March 15, 2018

First Page 1

Last Page 22

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15239/j.brcacadjb.2018.08.01.ja01

Abstract

We revisit the signaling hypothesis by examining whether stock splits contain information about future Operating Cash Flow (OCF) and Free Cash Flow (FCF) over the period 1963-2014. We use cash flows because they may be viewed as “cleaner” measures of performance (Barber and Lyon (1996)), and recent research finds that cash flow measures are better predictors of stock returns than various income statement-based measures (Foerster et al. (2017)). Logistic regression results indicate that split firms have significantly higher market-to-book, price, prior year returns, OCF, and FCF than non-split firms. We provide evidence that OCF and FCF are significant split factor determinants even after controlling for price, market value of equity, and Runup, although results differ for dividend- and non-dividend payers. Our results indicate that the split factor contains information about future stock price performance for split firms that pay dividends. Finally, we find that the coefficient for the regression residual is significantly positively related to various measures of current and future profitability, providing support for the signaling hypothesis.

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