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It is well documented that financial firms display a larger corporate payout propensity than non-financial firms. By using an international sample of listed firms from advanced economies, we show that this difference vanishes after accounting for heterogeneity among corporations in their financial leverage, stock market liquidity and share-ownership by institutional investors. A theoretical model that builds on Acharya et al.(2017) provides a framework to analyze the effect of corporate structure on payout decisions and rationalizes the economic mechanisms behind our empirical results.