Look to Small-Cap Dividend Payers in Retirement

Interested in dividends? It may be time to think small. Dividends of any sort can help deliver relatively steady returns and reduce your portfolio's overall risk. But dividend investing's benefits may be even greater in smaller companies than in larger firms, recent research suggests.

Although they're often overlooked by income investors, small-cap dividend payers give investors a bigger performance boost than large-cap dividend payers, according to a 2016 study in the Financial Analysts Journal. (Small caps are companies whose publicly traded shares have a relatively small market value--often in the range of a couple hundred million to several billion dollars, though exact definitions vary.)