For the past 30 years, the conventional wisdom has been that executive compensation packages should include very large proportions of incentive pay. This incentive pay orthodoxy has become so firmly entrenched that the current debates about executive compensation simply take it as a given. We...

As part of the most sweeping federal tax reform in a generation, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (“TCJA”) radically altered the tax treatment of compensation paid to senior executives of public companies. Prior to the TCJA, payment of such compensation in excess of one million dollars was...