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The purpose of this paper is to examine the dividend policy for firms listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. The results are consistent with the prediction of the catering theory in that managers choose a dividend policy to cater to the demand of investors.

Logistic regressions are used to test the catering theory hypothesis.

The results find that the firms distribute more stock dividends than other types of dividends when the dividend premium (DP) for stock dividends is positive. In contrast, firms shift from stock dividends to other types of dividends such as mixed dividends and cash dividends when the DP for stock dividends is negative.

The marginal contribution of this paper is that the firms change their dividend policy via DP to cater to the demand of investors.

This study uses stochastic dominance (SD) theory to examine whether the traditional festival, such as the Spring Festival (often in February), affects the patterns of monthly anomaly for the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors employ a new bootstrap-based test due to Linton, Maasoumi and Whang (hereafter LMW). The LMW test is well suited for financial time series data, such as monthly returns of various portfolios in this study, because it allows for general dependence among the prospects (distributions) and does not require the observations to be identically and independently distributed.

The particular findings of this study are that the February effect and the February-size effect indeed exist in the TWSE. Furthermore, allowing part of investors' assets is invested in the risky asset and the remaining part in a risk-free asset, first finding for monthly anomaly in the extant literature, is useful in distinguishing the performance among various size-month portfolios.

Instead of tax-loss and window dressing hypothesis, the Spring Festival money movement hypothesis can be used to well explain the findings.