Dividend Payout Ratios: Sexy Sex Edition

February 18, 2008 9:59 AM

Where can I find the dividend payout ratios for all industries?

Just trying to drum up some interest with the title there. Looking for dividend payout ratios for all industries, preferably back at least five years.

I've tried Yahoo!Finance but they only give dividend yield, or break it down by company. Same with our Bloomberg machine and S&P.

I've taken the biggest companies in each industry and calculated the average but my manager seems to want official averages according to a source like the very ones that are stumping me.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

posted by Idiot Mittens to Work & Money (5 answers total)

Ok, let's see - so presumably you've got a set of industries hopefully organised by NAICS (or IRS Activity or SIC) code. So for each industry you'd like actual cash payouts at the top level, rather than either overall payout or yield - correct?

DataStream would definitely have this information, at least in the lowest level of granularity. You'd have to code up something to aggregate upwards, keeping in mind components of whatever index classification system you're suing might and do change over time. Of course that would be after you'd coded something to download all times series of interest for each industry sector.

Interesting question - have you asked Bloomberg for a definitive opinion? I'm surprised they wouldn't offer this at the high level.

Interesting you should raise this now - I was just reading a paper by Damodaran (the equity risk premium is one of my personal research areas) and was referencing his data. He was looking at similar problems. Check out dividend fundamentals by sector; if it's not precisely what you're looking after perhaps an email to him might yield (no pun) some insight?

you do realise that the biggest companies in a given industry may not pay the highest dividend, either in terms of yield or absolute payment...so this selection would be biased. Then there's the problem of how one has selected the largest company - market cap? Sales? Earnings per share? No right or wrong answers here, just a decision that will have ramifications and must be capable of standing up to explanation.
posted by Mutant at 10:59 AM on February 18, 2008

Response by poster: Wicked. Thanks. Our Datastream is cut off right now due to an overdue bill. I talked to the "help" guy on the Bloomberg chat, but sometimes I get the sense they don't know what they're doing much more than I do.

The table lists Value Line as a source, so maybe I can find historical info through that.

And yeah, my industry averages were half-assed to say the least as far as methodology goes, still hoping to get higher-level averages.

Thanks man!
posted by Idiot Mittens at 11:15 AM on February 18, 2008

Response by poster: Oh, I found the historical info through the first link. Double sweet and double thanks.
posted by Idiot Mittens at 11:18 AM on February 18, 2008

Sorry for the tangent, but how is that service priced, e.g. what would you expect to pay as an average individual investor?
posted by arimathea at 12:37 PM on February 18, 2008

Sorry for the tangent, but how is that service priced, e.g. what would you expect to pay as an average individual investor?

I don't know the exact pricing but by a rough approximation (going from memory), Value Line is $1000 per year, a typical Reuters/Thomson basic subscription will set you back a few hundred dollars per month, a FactSet subscription probably $6-800 per month, and a Bloomberg terminal is in the $2000 monthly neighborhood.

Some public libraries have a lot of this stuff for free.
posted by Kwantsar at 2:06 PM on February 18, 2008