NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Wall Streeters are clamoring for companies to boost dividends.

Gone are the days when investors thought that the best use of the money a company earned (which is to say their money) was for management to hang on to it to fund aggressive expansion and acquisition plans. No thanks, we'll take the cash -- especially now that we don't get taxed so much on it.

But this is just another case where the noise the Street makes is at odds with what the Street actually does.

Credit Suisse First Boston quantitative strategist Ryan Renicker recently screened the S&P 1500 index for companies that have either initiated dividend programs or upped their dividend payouts by more than they have historically and then checked out how they did. On average, shares of the 47 companies he came up with slightly underperformed the market.

Breaking it down to a sector level, however, Renicker found that companies in what are considered the stodgier areas of the market -- industries like energy, utilities and materials -- saw their shares climb relative to their peers.

On the other side of the spectrum: Tech companies, which significantly underperformed the rest of the sector when they raised or initiated dividends. (Think Microsoft.)

Why is this? It looks like, at heart, investors buy into the idea -- espoused by folks like Cisco CEO John Chambers -- that a growing company should use its money to keep growing rather than give it back to shareholders. A tech company that ups its dividend, then, has signaled that its business has matured and its growth rate will be slower in the future.

This notion may not persist, however. Renicker's screen, after all, only goes back to the fall, when stocks began to move higher. One mark of the rally, thus far, has been that investors have tended to push money into stocks of lower-quality companies -- outfits that got beaten down hardest in the economic downturn and will rebound the most in the recovery. These aren't the sort of companies that are raising dividends.

Ultimately, according to work by Cliff Asness, managing principal at the hedge fund AQR Capital Management and First Quadrant chairman Rob Arnott, company earnings tend to grow fastest when dividend payout ratios are highest, while low dividends lead to low earnings growth.

Theoretically, at least, that shouldn't be the case -- back in the early 1960s the finance academics Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller "proved" that dividend policy should have no effect on a company's value. In practice, Asness and Arnott reckoned, when a company ups its dividend, management uses the cash left available to it far more carefully. Higher returns result.