John Virgil Lintner, Jr. (February 9, 1916 – June 8, 1983) was a professor at the Harvard Business School in the 1960s and one of the co-creators of the capital asset pricing model.
For a time, much confusion was created because the various economists working on this model independently failed to realize that they were saying much the same thing.
For the first time he presented what has become known as the "Lintner Paper," formally titled "The Potential Role of Managed Commodity-Financial Futures Accounts (and/or Funds) in Portfolios of Stocks and Bonds.
For NonCorrelated investors Lintner's work was a foundational milestone that has been used to advance this investment discipline.
He quickly impressed the faculty, and in 1942 became a member of the Society of Fellows, a three-year paid fellowship with no duties except self-directed research.
The logic is that every company wants to maintain a constant rate of dividend even if the results in a particular period are not up to the mark.