Mihail Topalov explores the question of why companies pay dividends. The first part of the book provides an overview of the existing theoretical explanations for dividend policy and the results of their empirical verification. In the second part of the work, the results of a survey conducted among CFOs of publicly traded companies in Germany are presented and analyzed. Subsequently, determinants of dividend policy are identified based on the available data, and hypotheses are formulated that allow for the empirical testing of the theoretical explanations through quantitative analysis.