Equity pay has been the primary component of managerial compensation packages at US public firms since the early 1990s. Using a comprehensive sample of top executives from 1992-2020, we estimate to what extent they trade firm equity held in their portfolios to neutralize increments in ownership...

Economic, social and governance (ESG) have become topical subjects amidst the deleterious effects of climate change, inequality and similar pressing challenges facing the people and the planet. The main objective of this study was to rank the importance of both the pillars within the ESG model...

As financial performance measures are not the sole determinant of chief executive officer (CEO) compensation, researchers have investigated social relationships between the CEO and the supervisory board's (SB's) members to identify other determinants. However, different conclusions have been...

CEOs of large firms filing for bankruptcy are more likely to exit the executive labor market after bankruptcy and experience substantial compensation losses (Eckbo et al., 2016). While the fear of reputational scarring can lead to lower risk-taking and manifest itself as lower rates of...

We survey directors and investors on the objectives, constraints, and determinants of CEO pay. 67% of directors would sacrifice shareholder value to avoid controversy on CEO pay, implying they face significant constraints other than participation and incentive compatibility. These constraints...

We estimate the effect of acquisition performance and acquisition activity on CEO compensation for the full set of CEOs of large public U.S. corporations in the Execucomp database over the period 1992-2016. Most previous work has focused on publicly traded acquisition targets. We focus on the...

Purpose: This study examines the moderating impact of corporate governance quality on the relation between CEO bonus compensation and accounting conservatism. Design/methodology/approach: We use market-based and accrual-based measures to estimate accounting conservatism. According to prior...

This study examines the effect of the CEO-employee pay gap on productivity and performance. Using extensive data of 751 constituents of the Standard and Poor's (S&P) 1500 index between the years 1992-2016, we found a cubic relationship between salary differential and corporate productivity, with...

We examine the influence of proxy advisors on firms’ shareholder engagement behavior. Our analyses exploit a quasi-natural experiment using Say-On-Pay voting outcomes near a threshold that triggers a review of engagement activities by Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS). Firms receiving...

The limitation of executive compensation has been a matter of public and policy debate for at least 20 years. We examine a first-time regulatory action where the deductibility of the total value of executive compensation is limited and unavoidable. We find that, rather than reduce remuneration,...

In this study, we examine the relationship between within-firm pay inequality and employee productivity. We use hand-collected data on a sample of S&P 1500 companies from 2018-2022 and find a concave relationship between the relative CEO pay and employee productivity. Consistent with tournament...

We consider a model of executive compensation in which CEOs have power to influence their compensation and test its implications using CEO compensation data from Execucomp. In the proposed model, CEOs endogenously determine their equity and salary compensation by maximizing the expected utility...

AbstractDivergent views exist about the impact of equity-based compensation on monitoring by Non-Executive Directors (NEDs) Prior studies report conflicting results mainly because of the endogeneity problem, which were not addressed or addressed using ineffective techniques. This study attempts...

Bank CEOs are held personally accountable for firms' performance, including the downside risk. Operational risk is largely idiosyncratic and operational risk event announcements signal flaws in banks' internal control systems and ineffective risk management. We examine the impact of operational...

Say on Pay legislations have become increasingly common over the past few decades, in tandem with more publicity around the compensation that is paid to executives/management of public companies. This publicity has, in turn, been driven largely by disclosure requirements imposed by the...

Unequal pay has become a global threat to meeting the United Nations’ sustainability goals. Taiwan has been making efforts to eliminate the pay disparity between executives and employees by requiring Taiwan-listed firms to disclose the prior year’s average non-executive employee...

The article provides in-depth analysis and concludes that while 2021 was a banner year for executive compensation with unprecedented increases in compensation levels across the board, 2022 and 2023 will be a challenge as the general stock price drop is about 25% for most companies, which will...

Despite claims that CEO compensation contracts are increasingly complex, little is known about the extent to which they are, what drives that complexity, and its implications. We develop a new measure of compensation contract complexity and find that complexity relates to factors capturing firm...

Bank CEOs are held personally accountable for firms' performance, including the downside risk. Operational risk is idiosyncratic and operational risk event announcements signal ineffective risk management. We examine the impact of operational risk announcements on different components of U.S....

We develop a model in which firms in financial distress design executive compensation contracts, hire and fire executives, and accept or reject government bailout funds that (if accepted) constrain the design of future compensation contracts. Using data from COMPUSTAT and ExecuComp (1992-2007)...

Shareholder say-on-pay votes allow institutional investors to influence the incentives of managers and, consequently, corporate behaviour. Surprisingly, the preferences of investors on executive compensation have been largely overlooked in the ongoing debates on sustainable corporate behaviour....

In this study, we examined the association between CEO greed and corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance with a particular emphasis on the curtailing role of corporate governance. We found that CEO greed has a negative effect on CSR, since an uncontrolled pursuit of personal gain...

Based on the impact of industry extreme return on the attention of institutional investors, taking Chinese A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2020 as a sample, this paper empirically tests the relationship between institutional investors’ distraction and executive compensation stickiness...

Aim/purpose - Higher compensation and increased share ownership are believed to drive fewer earnings management. Therefore, the study examines the moderating impact of share ownership on the relationship between executive compensation and earnings management of listed Deposit Money Banks in...

We examine the sensitivity of CEO compensation to pretax domestic and foreign incomes both before and after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA). Our results show firms reward foreign over domestic earnings prior to the TCJA, when foreign income was tax advantaged relative to domestic...

This study investigates whether and how minority shareholders activism (MSA) affects executives’ pay–performance sensitivity (PPS). Based on annual data of listed companies on SSE and SZSE from 2010 to 2021, we find that MSA significantly promotes executives’ pay-performance sensitivity,...