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...

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...