One of the main and more complex corporate financial decisions deals with the definition of the firm’s dividend policy, that is, the trade-off between distributing funds to shareholders and retaining the profits within the company. Marginal corporate and individual tax rates are one of the main factors that corporations ponder in such decision. Among emerging markets, Brazil is known as a country where such marginal tax rates are high, which suggests that companies pursue active tax planning strategies, which include changes in their dividend policies in response to changes in the tax legislation. This paper tests the influence of the tax preference theory on public Brazilian companies and is motivated, fundamentally, by the many changes in the tax legislation that Brazil has been through in this period, which makes for a good laboratory to study this problem. Another relevant aspect of this paper is the legal framework of corporate law in Brazil, which allows a firm to issue up to two-thirds of its total equity in nonvoting preferred shares. Therefore, to hold complete sway over a public corporation in Brazil, the controlling shareholders may have as little as 16.7 per cent of firm’s total equity. Such disproportional power raises obvious agency problems between majority and minority shareholders. Such legislation was originally established in 1976 by Act 6404/1076. It has been changed in 2001 by Act 10303/2001, which limited the maximum proportion of nonvoting shares to one-half. However, the new legislation preserved the status of existing companies. Thus, the new requirement applies only to firms, who were either created or went public after 2001, preserving the statutory privileges of existing ones. To investigate such problem, we collect data on 672 firms listed in the São Paulo Stock Exchange (Bovespa) between 1986 and 2011, making up a total of 30,134 observations. We identify the pertinent changes of the tax legislation and check the effect of such exogenous changes on corporate dividend policies of preferred and common shares of listed firms. The paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 presents a brief history of taxation law applied to dividend payments in Brazil. Section 3 summarizes previous empirical literature on this subject in Brazil. Section 4 presents the research method and describes the sample. Section 5 presents the results of our analysis. Section 6 concludes the paper.