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Perhaps the answers to these questions are obvious. Perhaps dividends represent the return to the investor who puts his money at risk in the corporation. Perhaps corporations pay dividends to reward existing shareholders, and to encourage others to buy new issues of common stock at high prices. Perhaps investors pay attention to dividends because only through dividends or the prospect of dividends do they receive a return on their investment or the chance to sell their shares at a higher price in the future.
Or perhaps the answers are not so obvious. Perhaps a corporation that pays no dividends is demonstrating confidence that it has attractive investment opportunities that might be missed if it paid dividends. If it makes these investments, it may increase the value of the shares by more than the amount of the lost dividends. If that happens, its shareholders may be doubly better off. They end up with capital appreciation greater than the dividends they missed out on, and they find they are taxed at lower effective rates on capital appreciation than on dividends. https://www.51lunwen.org/CorporateAccountability/
In fact, I claim that the answers to these questions are not obvious at all. The harder we look at the dividend picture, the more it seems like a puzzle, with pieces that just don’t fit together. Suppose you are offered the following choice. You may have $2 today, and a 50-50 chance of $54 or $50 tomorrow. Or you may have nothing today, and a 50–50 chance of $56 or $52 tomorrow. Would you prefer one of these gambles to the other? Probably you would not. Ignoring such factors as the cost of holding the $2 and one day’s interest on $2, you would be indifferent between these two gambles.

The choice between a common stock that pays a dividend and a stock that pays no dividend is similar, at least if we ignore such things as transaction costs and taxes. The price of the dividend-paying stock drops on the ex- dividend date by about the amount of the dividend. The dividend just drops the whole range of possible stock prices by that amount. The investor who gets a $2 dividend finds himself with shares worth about $2 less than they would have been worth if the dividend hadn’t been paid, in all possible circumstances.

在本质上，这是的米勒莫迪里阿尼定理。它说，一个公司支付的股息不会影响其股份或投资者的收益，因为较高的股息意味着投资者收到的资本增值较少，无论是公司的经营还是决策的结果。

This, in essence, is the Miller-Modigliani theorem. It says that the dividends a corporation pays do not affect the value of its shares or the returns to investors, because the higher the dividend, the less the investor receives in capital appreciation, no matter how the corporation’s business decision turns out. When we say this, we are assuming that the dividend paid does not influence the corporation’s business decisions. Paying the dividend either reduces the amount of cash equivalents held by the corporation, or increases the amount of money raised by issuing securities.
If this theorem is correct, then a firm that pays a regular dividend equal to about half of its normal earnings will be worth the same as an otherwise similar firm that pays no dividends and will never pay any dividends. Can that be true? How can a firm that will never pay dividends be worth anything at all? Actually, there are