We congratulate Artem Anilov, postgraduate student and senior lecturer at the School of Finance, on the brilliant defense of his Ph.D. thesis!

Dissertation topic: "MANAGERIAL COMPENSATION, OVERCONFIDENCE AND PAYOUT POLICY"
Applicant - Anilov Artyom
Academic Supervisor - Ivashkovskaya Irina

Committee members: Sergey Stepanov (HSE University, PhD, Committee Chairman),
Olga Lazareva (HSE University, Ph.D., member of the committee),
Malenko Nadezhda (Steven Ross Business School of Michigan State University, PhD, member of the committee),
Simonov Andrey (Eli Broad Business College of Michigan State University, Ph.D., member of the committee),
Suvorov Anton (HSE University, Ph.D., member of the committee)

Annotation: The dissertation investigates the impact of Chief Executive Officer's (CEO's) characteristics: rational compensation incentives and irrational bias, such as overconfidence, - on payout decisions. Based on the sample of 813 companies from the USA, we have shown that higher levels of inside debt lead to higher probability and level of repurchases and incentivise a CEO to use repurchases as a main channel of payout. Different components of inside debt provide different incentives in terms of payout decisions. Moreover, overconfident CEOs tend to set lower levels of cash dividends and higher levels of repurchases and to use repurchases as a main channel of payout.
By implementing the index of corporate governance quality, we have shown that corporate governance of higher quality is able to reduce the impact of CEO's overconfidence on payout decisions. We show that gender diversity and audit committee independence show better ability to reduce the impact of CEO’s overconfidence on payout decisions than the size of the board, board of directors’ independence, and CEO duality. We have found that this ability benefits shareholders as it limits the detrimental effects of overconfidence and utilises their benefits for the purposes of improving company’s profitability.