We examine whether board and ownership structure variables explain the level of chief executive officer (CEO) compensation. After controlling for standard economic determinants (i.e., the firm's demand for a high-quality CEO, firm performance, and risk), we find that board and ownership...

We examine the press' role in monitoring and influencing executive compensation practice using more than 11,000 press articles about CEO compensation from 1994 to 2002. Negative press coverage is more strongly related to excess annual pay than to raw annual pay, suggesting a sophisticated...

Stock and option compensation and the level of managerial equity incentives are aspects of corporate governance that are especially controversial to shareholders, institutional activists, and government regulators. Similar to much of the corporate finance and corporate governance literature,...

[...]We also concentrate our survey on literature that testseconomic hypotheses within samples of U.S. firms. However,we believe that much of our discussion can be generalized tofirms throughout the world. Bushman and Smith (2003)present a broad overview of how differences in...