Admati and Pfleiderer (2006) demonstrate that under some conditions, linking CEO pay to share price performance may aggravate agency conflicts. Two fundamental conflicts are considered: the manager may take value-destroying, privately beneficial ('bad') actions, or value-enhancing, privately...

We use compensation data for a sample of 701 US public firms and document a significant positive relation between the level of executive compensation and the subsequent realized stock returns. In present value terms, shareholders in firms incurring a total compensation cost of $78 million above...