경영자의 자기과신 성향과 배당성향의 관계 : 재벌기업을 중심으로

This paper investigates the association between CEO overconfidence and dividend payout policy in Korea. Prior studies examined whether individual executive traits affect corporate dividend payout (Deschmukh 2013), not yet whether CEO overconfidence causes low dividend payout in Korea. The tests are done on a sample over 2002 to 2015 from KOSPI listed firms in Korea. The first measure of overconfidence is based on net purchases of the firm’s stocks by the CEO since overconfident CEOs will tend to buy more of their firms’ shares relative to other CEOs. Another measure of overconfidence is from the timing of stock option exercise. Overconfident CEO would believe that firm value will increase and thus choose to defer exercise and hold stock options. There are three main results. First, all dividend payout measures are negatively related to each of the two CEO overconfidence measures. Second, the relation between overconfidence and corporate dividend payout weakens for the firms belonging to large business groups (Chaebols). Third, This paper demonstrates that as control-ownership disparity (wedge) of business group becomes larger, CEO overconfidence is mitigated. Additionally, the relation between overconfidence and dividend payout weakens for the firms with stronger governance such as outside directors, or foreign ownership.