Dividend checks continue to get fatter in corporate America, as more companies jack up their distribution rates.

Readers of the Income Investor newsletter can certainly appreciate that kind of thinking. Let's take a closer look at some of the companies that inched their payouts higher this past week.

Let's start with PotashCorp (NYSE: POT). The fertilizer giant isn't just growing crops, declaring a 3-for-1 stock split and more than doubling its dividend. Potash's new post-split quarterly rate of $0.07 a share is a 110% improvement. Returning money to its shareowners is one way to get them to forget about the buyout offer it recently swatted away.

Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) is also padding the pockets of its couch potato investors. The cable provider's new quarterly rate is $0.48 a share, 20% ahead of its earlier disbursements. This may seem like a bold bet, as cord cutting continues to plague programming providers. Time Warner Cable shed 141,000 residential video subscribers over the past three months. It has been able to more than offset that through price hikes and growth in other services, but the hikes are unlikely to continue if television watchers continue to cancel their cable plans.

Payouts are bubbling higher overseas, too. Panama's Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior -- or Bladex (NYSE: BLX), for short -- is boosting its quarterly distributions by 18% to $0.20 a share.

Finally, we have National Instruments (Nasdaq: NATI) on the move. The maker of engineering software and measurement tools topped off a record a quarter by inching its quarterly dividend 15% higher to $0.15 a share.

An improving economy is giving more companies the flexibility to prop up their yields. These four companies join energy-based partnerships Magellan Midstream (NYSE: MMP), Atlas Pipeline (NYSE: APL), and Star Gas (NYSE: SGU) in energizing their already generous disbursements.

Subscribers to the Income Investor newsletter can appreciate the companies sending more and more money to their investors. The newsletter singles out companies that are committed to growing their distributions with market-thumping results.

Want to see what is being recommended these days? Go ahead and give the newsletter service a shot with a 30-day trial subscription. Who knows? Maybe the next thing that will get hiked will be your interest.