Remuneration consultants are an integral part of the process of determining executive pay in large listed companies. This paper discusses the role of the consultants in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada, analyses their industry and the factors currently affecting it, and summarizes...

We propose a measure of the advising capacity of corporate boards that focuses on the distribution of committee assignments. We then study the characteristics and impact of directors dedicated to providing strategic counsel to top management. We find that advisory directors possess professional...

Using hand-collected compensation consultant data, we investigate whether compensation consultants exhibit distinct styles in the determination of CEO pay level and compensation structure. Our tests, which include the use of placebo samples that involve the scrambling of consultants as...

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of compensation consultants on CEO pay. We show that the use of a compensation consultant has an increasing effect on the level of total CEO compensation, which is consistent with the “ratcheting up” effect of consultants on CEO pay argued by...

We investigate the impact of a firm's compensation consultant choice on executive compensation by examining shifts in consultant choice following a 2009 US Securities Exchange Commission requirement that firms disclose fees paid to compensation consultants for both consulting and other services....

This paper (forthcoming in Research in International Business and Finance) examines the practice of employing multiple compensation consultants. Examining data of a sample of UK companies over the period 2003–2006 we find that CEOs receive higher equity-based pay when firms employ more than...