Corporate Governance and Dividend Policy in European Banking

This dissertation investigates corporate governance and dividend policy in banking. This topic has recently attracted the attention of numerous scholars all over the world and currently remains one of the most discussed topics in Banking. The core of the dissertation is constituted by three papers. The first paper generalizes the main achievements in the field of relevant study using the approach of meta-analysis. The second paper provides an empirical analysis of the effect of banking corporate governance on dividend payout. Finally, the third paper investigates empirically the effect of government bailout during 2007-2010 on corporate governance and dividend policy of banks. The dissertation uses a new hand-collected data set with information on corporate governance, ownership structure and compensation structure for a sample of listed banks from 15 European countries for the period 2005-2010. The empirical papers employ such econometric approaches as Within-Group model, difference-in-difference technique, and propensity score matching method based on the Nearest Neighbor Matching estimator. The main empirical results may be summarized as follows. First, we provide evidence that CEO power and connection to government are associated with lower dividend payout ratios. This result supports the view that banking regulators are prevalently concerned about the safety of the bank, and powerful bank CEOs can afford to distribute low payout ratios, at the expense of minority shareholders. Next, we find that government bailout during 2007-2010 changes the banks’ ownership structure and helps to keep lending by bailed bank at the pre-crisis level. Finally, we provide robust evidence for increased control over the banks that receive government money. These findings show the important role of government when overcoming the consequences of the banking crisis, and high quality of governance of public bailouts in European countries.