The Mediating Effect of Dividend Policy on the Quality of Corporate Governance and Informative Income Smoothing

The present study investigates the mediating effect of the dividend policy on the relationship between corporate governance quality and informative income smoothing. Tucker and Zarowin (TZ) and Albrecht and Richardson (AR) approaches are utilized as the proxies of informative income smoothing. In addition, the accumulated coding method and dividend are applied to measure the corporate governance quality and dividend policy respectively. By applying a systematic elimination method, 109 firms remained as the final sample for the period from 2007 to 2014. Using the TZ method, we found that there is a significant and positive relationship between corporate governance quality and informative income smoothing. Finally, according to the results of Sobel’s Test, the role of dividend policy as a mediating variable was not verified in the relationship between corporate governance quality and informative corporate governance (TZ); however, if the AR method is used for measuring informative income smoothing, the dividend policy may mediate the relationship between corporate governance quality and informative income smoothing.