Contrôle exercé par le Conseil d’administration et Rémunération des dirigeants : réplication de la recherche de Boyd (1994) au contexte français.

This paper examines the role of board of directors’ control over the determination of French executives’ compensation. The theoretical root of this article is that of the agency theory, a dominant theory in the study of the determinants of executives’ compensation. Starting from the fact that few French researches have studied the determinants of executives’ compensation, we replicate Boyd’s (1994) research. The following hypothesis is tested: CEO’s compensation is inversely linked to the level of board control. The main objective of this paper is to complete the existing literature, mainly Anglo-Saxon, by bringing results from a different context, the French context. The question is: in France, can we find, in a different economical political and cultural context, the results put forward by Anglo-Saxon literature? We display a quantitative methodology, based on structural equation models (PLS Graph), to test our hypothesis. We consider the level of board control as a latent variable measured by five formatives indicators. Our results point out two essentials facts. Firstly, we confirm that, in a French context, the level of executives’ compensation is inversely related to the level of board control. Secondly, we show that all the indicators measuring the level of control of the board of directors are not significant. So, this paper combines both empirical and methodological contributions.