Sasin School of Management, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.
Center of Excellence in Management Research for Corporate Governance & Behavioral Finance, Sasin School of Management, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.
PLoS One. 2023 Feb 2;18(2):e0281109. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0281109. eCollection 2023.
We investigated the effect of uncertainty associated with infectious diseases on corporate dividend policy. We used a unique text-based measure of infectious diseases that includes not only the Covid-19, but also other important diseases, such as SARs, MERs, and Ebola. Based on a sample of 287,151 firm-year observations across four decades (from 1985 to 2021), our results show that a higher level of uncertainty associated with infectious diseases significantly reduce dividends. Interestingly, we also found that having more independent directors on the board mitigates the negative effect of uncertainty associated with infectious diseases on dividends which implies that the reduction in dividends was partly driven by agency conflicts. We performed several robustness checks which confirm that our findings are unlikely to be affected by endogeneity issues.
我们研究了与传染病相关的不确定性对公司股利政策的影响。我们使用了一种基于文本的传染病衡量方法，该方法不仅包括新冠病毒（Covid-19），还包括其他重要疾病，如非典（SARS）、中东呼吸综合征（MERS）和埃博拉病毒。基于四个十年（1985 年至 2021 年）的 287,151 个公司年度观测样本，我们的结果表明，与传染病相关的不确定性水平越高，股利就越低。有趣的是，我们还发现，董事会中拥有更多独立董事可以减轻传染病相关不确定性对股利的负面影响，这意味着股利的减少部分是由代理冲突引起的。我们进行了几项稳健性检验，以确认我们的发现不太可能受到内生性问题的影响。
