The effect of independent directors on dividends in the presence of infectious diseases.

Our measure of disease-related uncertainty is the infectious disease equity market volatility developed by Baker et al. (2020) [9]. Using sophisticated textual analysis, Baker et al. (2020) [9] search for news articles related to infectious diseases and equity market volatility. A higher fraction of these news articles to all articles in each time period signifies a higher level of market uncertainty that can be ascribed to infectious diseases. For ease of interpretation, we have the infectious disease equity market volatility index divided by 100.