The only paper I could find is the following:
Dividend Yield Strategy in the British Stock Market 1994-2007 by Brzeszczynski et al. (2008)
It states that a portfolio of stocks with high dividend yields outperforms the broad market most of the time.
Now of course this is only the UK market within a period of a little more than a decade. So I am looking for more papers on this topic covering more markets and longer periods of time.