There have been many studies in the past which have studied the relationship between dividend policy of a firm its characteristics. This study builds upon these and extends the research to publicly traded, North American firms in the past 30-year time period (1989-2019). The key question that this research paper aims to answer is which, if any, firm characteristics have any causal relationship with the dividend payout ratio of the firm. This study also looks at the appearing and disappearing phenomenon of cash dividends in the past 30 years and aims to reconcile the changing characteristics of the firms to this phenomenon. This is done by creating sub-periods within the dataset and observing the changing characteristics of the firms and the possible impact on the dividend payout ratios of the firms. It was found that size and liquidity produce statistically significant results in terms of having some relationship the dividend payout ratios of the firms. After performing the Granger-Causality test, it was determined that only liquidity of the firm has some causal relationship with the dividend payout ratio of a firm.
