59

Initially affecting Chinese and Asian markets from December 2019, the economic consequences of the COVID-19 crisis have spread widely to all stock markets since late February 2020. The crisis has caused large-scale stock market movements that can be explained by a lack of visibility on the real systemic effects of a prolonged lockdown on companies’ performance in subsequent fiscal years. Many companies, whether out of natural precaution or necessity, have decided to review their dividend payment policies, either reducing dividends or canceling them altogether. We divide all the companies making up Euronext Paris’s SBF 120 index into two groups: one comprising those that have decided to cancel all dividends for the 2019 financial year, and the other of those that have maintained or reduced them. Considering the importance of informational documentation related to dividend distribution policies, we hypothesize that the signals sent to the markets are fundamentally different depending on the type of decisions taken. After March 27 and the state’s unprecedented intervention in this debate, revising dividend policy may simply be expected practice, with no effect on investor behavior. Our results suggest that the intervention of the French state and, to a certain extent, that of the European Central Bank on March 27 tempered the behavior of financial players when the dividend revision was announced. Over the entire period, shareholders tended to welcome the payout announcements (even reduced ones), but in a more pronounced and statistically significant way after March 27.