Executive Academic Experience And Corporate Dividends

The phenomenon of non-dividend and less dividends of listed companies in China has become a problem that plagues China’s capital market.In addition,the awareness of protection of small and medium-Sized investors is not strong,and the dividend rights have been greatly damaged.In response to the dividend problem of listed companies,China has introduced a series of policies equivalent to semi-mandatory dividends since 2001.It has made policy provisions and restrictions on the dividends of listed companies,but it still cannot effectively solve this problem.At the same time,the"Dividend puzzle" of listed companies have also been heatedly discussed and extensively studied in the academic world.Scholars have carried out multi-angles on the factors affecting the dividend policy of enterprises according to the agency theory and signal transmission theory of dividend policy.That include the macro environment,external governance factors,intrinsic characteristics of enterprises and corporate governance.Based on the proposal of the high-Level echelon theory and the principal-agent problem of the enterprise,some scholars have turned the research perspective into the influence of the characteristics of executives on corporate dividends.The high-level echelon theory believes that the different characteristics of executives will affect the business decision-making and management of enterprises,resulting in different performance and development direction.As has been shown,the gender,age,tenure,overconfidence characteristics and various background characteristics of executives will have an impact on the company’s dividend policy.Since the reform and opening up,there has been a phenomenon of "literatures going to sea to do business".Some people who have served in universities,research institutes or industry associations have entered the role of senior executives.The academic experience of these executives has been researched in recent years.At present,there is no research to combine the academic experience of executives with the dividend policy of enterprises,and the academic experience of senior executives as a feature of executives with Chinese characteristics is of important significance for solving the dividend problem of listed companies in China.Therefore,this paper focuses on the academic experience of executives,and studies and discusses its impact on the dividend decision-making of enterprises.In this paper,we use the method of empirical research to select 23,193 sample data of Shanghai and Shenzhen A shares’ 3449 listed companies from 2008 to 2017,and study the differences in the dividend Levels of enterprises with senior academic experience and executives who do not have academic experience.The study found that the academic experience of executives can promote the formation of a self-monnitoring and restraining mechanism for executives,which can effectively alleviate the principal-agent conflicts of enterprises,thereby significantly improving the dividend Level of enterprises.By introducing external governance and the influencing factors of the nature of corporate property rights,it discovered that while external governance is weak and non-State-owned enterprises,the academic experience of senior executives has more obvious effects on the improvement of corporate dividends,further verifying the self-monitoring of executives with academic experience.The existence of the constraint mechanism indicates that this mechanism is equivalent to a supplement and substitution of corporate governance.In addition,in the test of the mechanism of action,it was found that the academic experience of executives significantly increased the level of corporate dividends by easing financing constraints rather than alleviating the path of excessive investment.The research conclusions of this paper enrich the theory of high-Level echelon,and improve and supplement the research on the characteristics of executives and the factors affecting dividends.From the perspective of enterprises themselves,the authors find out the new evidence of corporate dividends under Chinese context and provides a reference for the Chinese government to more effectively manage the dividends of listed companies.At the same time,the academic experience of executives provides a new way of thinking and new methods for improving corporate governance,and it is a new"tool" for improving corporate governance.