Analysis of the Impact of Supply Chain Relationship Strategy on Corporate Cash Dividend Policy Based on Chinese Data

Abstract

With the development and application of e-commerce in the process of supply chain integration, the choice of supplier centralized strategy or decentralized mode and how to use supplier financing have become significant contents of supply chain management. This study investigates the effect of competition and cooperation on the corporate cash dividend policy under the influence of the supplier relationship strategy and its mediating mechanism based on Chinese data. The motivation of this study is to provide a basis for enterprises to grasp the dynamic evolution process of the economic consequences of supply chain relationships based on big data and adjust the relationship strategy in time to maximize the positive effects of supplier relationships. This study considers supplier concentration and supplier financing as two dimensions to measure the supplier relationship strategy and selects the balanced panel data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2020 as samples by applying the Logit and Tobit model. The results demonstrate that the supplier relationship is negatively correlated with the cash dividends. The intermediary effect found that the competition effect of the supplier relationship aggravates the agency conflict of enterprises and intensifies the degree of financing constraints, and thus acts on the cash dividends of enterprises. This study expands the economic consequences of relational transactions and provides an explanation of dividend policies from the perspective of a supply chain.

Keywords: agency cost; cash dividends; financing constraints; supplier concentration; supplier financing.