In contrast to the disappearing dividends view prevalent in the literature, we document extensive dividend payments by firms and significant variability within firms and across 16 countries during 2000-2013. We predict that within-firm variability in dividends increases investor demand for forward-looking dividend information, and analysts respond by producing informative dividend forecasts. We find that analyst dividend forecasts are available for most dividend-paying firms and are more prevalent for firms with higher variability of dividends. Analyst dividend forecasts are more accurate than alternative proxies based on extrapolations of past dividends. Finally, dividend forecasts (i) are incrementally useful to investors beyond information in other fundamentals such as earnings and cash flow forecasts, (ii) help investors interpret earnings quality, and (iii) are associated with investors' portfolio allocation decisions.

中文翻译：

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分析师股息预测及其对投资者的有用性

与文献中普遍存在的股息消失观点相反，我们记录了 2000-2013 年间公司广泛的股息支付以及公司内部和 16 个国家的显着变化。我们预测，公司内部股息的可变性增加了投资者对前瞻性股息信息的需求，分析师通过提供信息丰富的股息预测做出回应。我们发现分析师的股息预测适用于大多数支付股息的公司，并且对于股息可变性较高的公司更为普遍。分析师的股息预测比基于过去股息外推的替代代理更准确。最后，股息预测 (i) 除了收益和现金流预测等其他基本面信息之外，对投资者的作用也越来越大，