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Professionals inside the board room: accounting expertise of directors and dividend policy

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  • Zheng Qiao
  • Ken Y. Chen
  • Shengmin Hung

Abstract

Directors’ personal attributes have significant impacts on governance effectiveness. We study whether directors’ accounting expertise affects corporate financial policy and investigate dividend in specific. We construct a dataset of audit committee directors’ accounting expertise for Standard & Poor 500 firms from 2005 to 2012. We first verify directors’ monitoring roles by showing that firms with accounting expert sitting on their audit committees demonstrate stronger accounting conservatism. In our main tests, we find that these firms maintain lower dividend payment level, which are less sensitive to earnings volatility. This suggests directors’ advisory roles in financial policy. We further show that our accounting expertise cannot be subsumed by management ability. In additional test, we further examine the baseline results conditional on analyst forecast error. Our findings highlight the importance of directors’ professional expertise in fulfilling their governance roles.

Suggested Citation

  • Zheng Qiao & Ken Y. Chen & Shengmin Hung, 2018. "Professionals inside the board room: accounting expertise of directors and dividend policy," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 50(56), pages 6100-6111, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:applec:v:50:y:2018:i:56:p:6100-6111
    DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2018.1489501
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Mazur, Mieszko & Dang, Man & Vo, Thuy Anh Thi, 2020. "Dividend Policy and the COVID-19 Crisis," MPRA Paper 108765, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Peter J Baldacchino & Jean Paul Abela & Norbert Tabone & Simon Grima, 2021. "Board of Director Diversity and Its Corporate Governance Implications in Maltese Equity-Listed Companies," International Journal of Finance, Insurance and Risk Management, International Journal of Finance, Insurance and Risk Management, vol. 11(4), pages 37-65.
    3. Sattar Khan & Yasir Kamal & Muhammad Abbas & Shahid Hussain, 2022. "Board of directors and earnings manipulation: evidence from regulatory change," Future Business Journal, Springer, vol. 8(1), pages 1-22, December.
    4. Ben Posmanick & Alex Obie & Bobby Chung, 2024. "Licensed Professionals and Corporate Board Performance: The Effect of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act on the Audit Committee," Working Papers 2024-03, University of South Florida, Department of Economics.
    5. Xinfeng Jiang & Jiayi Zhu & Ahsan Akbar & Ziyu Hou & Xiaolan Bao, 2022. "The dark side of executives' professional background: Evidence from Chinese firm's stock price crash risk," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 43(8), pages 3771-3784, December.
    6. Alla V. VAVILINA & Lidiya N. LEVANOVA & Irina N. TKACHENKO, 2019. "Interrelation between dividend policy and corporate reputation in Russian companies," Upravlenets, Ural State University of Economics, vol. 10(4), pages 14-23, September.
    7. Kamran Mohy-Ud-Din & Riaz Ahmad & Hafiz Muhammad Ishaq & Muhammad Akram, 2022. "Moderating Role of Investment Efficiency between Board Diversity and Dividend Policy: Evidence from Pakistan," iRASD Journal of Management, International Research Alliance for Sustainable Development (iRASD), vol. 4(2), pages 286-298, june.
    8. Tankiso MOLOI & Tatenda NHARO & Modi HLOBO, 2021. "Relationship between Board Characteristics and Dividend Payment Policies," Journal of Academic Finance, RED research unit, university of Gabes, Tunisia, vol. 12(1), pages 30-52, June.

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