High levels of executive pay in the USA and the UK have attracted journalistic and academic criticism to the effect that they constitute rent extraction by self-interested executives rather than rewards for raising shareholder returns. The focus of most criticism has been on salary, severance...

Analysis of UK financial sector bonus schemes in the years immediately prior to the financial crisis of 2008/09 reveals significant changes in their structure and complexity. In terms of the determinants of levels of bonus award, leverage as a measure of risk exposure is not significant, whilst...

The sensitivity of executive pay to share price performance has been the main focus of Western executive pay studies, reflecting shareholders’ efforts to reduce agency problems by better aligning the rewards of executives with their own. However, these studies have ignored motivational effects...

Using a hitherto neglected source of data, this paper combines executive emoluments with executive options to construct a broader measure of executive pay than has been possible in earlier British studies. The result of including the long-term share option component of pay along with the more...

We argue that the dominance of principal-agent theory as an approach to investigating executive pay has led to an overly narrow focus which may be unhelpful when considering cross-country differences and probably also hinders within-country analysis. The paper discusses the interlinked nature of...