CEO power, corporate risk management, and dividends: disentangling CEO managerial ability from entrenchment

Abstract We contribute to the literature on dividend policy by considering two largely ignored, yet important factors, namely CEO power and corporate risk management. We first disentangle CEO managerial ability from entrenchment - the two sources of leadership autonomy that are not normally distinguished in prior literature. Using UK (re)insurance data that allows us to objectively and reliably quantify risk management and to identify powerful stakeholders with monitoring incentives (e.g., shareholders and regulatory body), we find that risk management enables entrenched CEOs to increase dividends to avoid monitoring by shareholders without compromising financial resilience and increasing the risk of regulatory scrutiny. Further, we neither find the degree of CEO managerial ability nor its interaction with risk management to be related to dividends, suggesting that the competing incentives for talented CEOs to pay higher/lower level of dividends cancel out in cross-sectional tests. Nonetheless, we find that the signalling effects of dividends for future accounting earnings only exist in insurers with high ability CEOs. This is consistent with the view that talented CEOs are able to generate sustainable earnings, and when they choose to pay (more) dividends, they do so to externally signal their managerial ability.