This study investigates how CEO political ideology affects payout policy. Studying the CEOs of S&P 500 firms during 1997–2019 and measuring CEO political ideology by CEO political donations, we find that conservative CEOs are more likely to pay dividends and to make share repurchases, while also paying higher dividends. We find that conservative CEOs finance the higher dividends and share repurchases by utilizing the cash holdings and reducing capital and R&D expenditures. Nevertheless, CEO political ideology does not explain dividend cuts. This suggests that firms led by conservative CEOs exhibit levels of dividend flexibility comparable to those of firms led by other CEOs. Finally, we find that CEO conservatism has no effect on firm performance, firm value, R&D expenditure, and capital expenditure.

Using a hand-collected dataset, we study whether CEO political ideology affected S&P 500 firms’ reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. During the pandemic, CEOs had the option to distribute the pain of the pandemic’s impact onto shareholders by paying lower dividends, onto the workforce by reducing labor costs, or to share the pain. We hypothesize that conservative CEOs were more likely to aggressively reduce labor costs while still meeting dividend expectations. Conversely, other CEOs would have been less likely to meet dividend expectations and less likely to reduce labor costs. Our findings support this hypothesis. We also find that during the pandemic, conservative CEOs used temporary downsizing to avoid earnings losses, enabling them to meet dividend expectations.