Abstract
We argue that CEOs have different attitudes toward the firm’s stakeholders and that these differences in attitudes affect the firm’s decision making. We hypothesize that these differences stem from differences in political ideology: Liberal CEOs, as compared to their conservative counterparts, pay less attention to shareholders and this is reflected in dividend policy. To test the validity of our hypothesis, we measure CEO ideology by political donations. We study the CEOs of S&P 500 firms during 1997-2014 and find that firms with liberal CEOs are less likely to pay dividends and have significantly lower dividend payouts. In contrast,conservative CEOs pay more dividends, even if this requires redundancies.
Original language | English |
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Publisher | European Corporate Governance Institute |
Number of pages | 55 |
Volume | 650/2020 |
Publication status | Published - 20 Jan 2020 |
Publication series
Name | ECGI Working Paper Series in Finance |
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Keywords
- CEO political ideology
- corporate governance
- dividend policy
- stakeholder theory
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Ali Bayat
- Business School, Africa-Asia Centre for Sustainability (AACS)
- Business School, Business Management - Lecturer
Person: Academic