Dividends reduce shareholder equity and give shareholders the same amount of cash so they are indeed neutral if you ignore taxes. The same is true for the marke

Dividends reduce shareholder equity and give shareholders the same amount of cash so they are indeed neutral if you ignore taxes. The same is true for the market value of a company. If a company has a market cap of Y and pays out X in cash the market cap will tend to reduce by roughly X in any normally functioning market.