Pay for Performance and Corporate Governance Reform

Directors’ pay and corporate governance continue to generate public outrage and calls for reform. Our meta-regression analysis of all comparable UK pay-for-performance estimates finds little, if any, meaningful association between directors’ pay and corporate performance. However, there is evidence of the effectiveness of past ‘comply-or-explain’ rules, especially the Cadbury Report. Unfortunately, the effects of past reform efforts tend to erode over time. The paper also explores differences between pay-performance estimates, finding that these are largely explained by how pay and performance are measured by a given study.