Many US companies with December 31, 2019 as their fiscal year end had their Annual Shareholder Meeting scheduled (usually online) during the COVID pandemic. Unexpectedly faced with significant changes in operating environments, some companies decided to suspend shareholder dividend payments. In normal circumstances, this would be interpreted as a very negative event and shareholders could be expected to respond adversely at the annual meeting. However, we investigate whether CEOs were able to maintain shareholder support by offering a previously unheard of response of “sharing the pain”, committing to cut their own pay following a dividend suspension. At issue is whether investors acted as if they updated their inferences using the new voluntary pay-cut decision to infer the extent to which the CEOs underlying personality type was well matched to crisis management. We estimate an instrumental variables model in which the dividend suspension is used as an instrument for the endogenous pay cut variable.

在 COVID 大流行期间，许多以 2019 年 12 月 31 日为财政年度结束的美国公司都安排了年度股东大会（通常在线）。不料经营环境发生重大变化，部分企业决定暂停派发股东股息。在正常情况下，这将被解释为非常负面的事件，预计股东会在年会上做出不利的回应。然而，我们调查了 CEO 是否能够通过提供前所未有的“分担痛苦”的回应来维持股东的支持，承诺在暂停股息后削减自己的工资。问题在于投资者是否表现得好像他们使用新的自愿减薪决定更新了他们的推论，以推断 CEO 的潜在性格类型与危机管理的匹配程度。我们估计了一个工具变量模型，在该模型中，股息暂停被用作内生减薪变量的工具。