경영자 능력, 기업수명주기 및 기업의 배당정책

This paper examines which incentive leads higher-ability managers to make dividend payout policy by investigating the association between managerial ability suggested by Demerjian et al.(2012) and dividend payout policy in Korea. First, we find that managerial ability is negatively associated with the dividend payout, indicating that high-ability managers make decisions to maintain their reputation or pursue their personal opportunistic benefits rather than the benefits of shareholders under the situation of conflicts between shareholders and managers. Second, we also find that there exist differences of these relationship depending on the corporate life cycle. Negative association between managerial ability and dividend payout is more pronounced for firms with maturity stage but weakens for the firms with declining stage. This results imply that, in maturity stage with maximized sales or profits, the higher-ability managers strengthen the incentive of opportunistic private interest whereas, in the decreasing stage with limitation in sustainability, the higher-ability managers are less inclined to reduce the dividend payout. This study is expected to contribute to the literature by providing empirical evidence that higher-ability managers are less willing to pay dividend for their private benefits.