We find that social capital, as captured by secular norms and networks surrounding corporate headquarters, is negatively associated with total and equity-based CEO compensation. This relation is robust in tests for omitted variables, in instrumental-variable regressions, and in regressions using...

We study the pay of UK universities chief executives ("vice-chancellors") over a ten year period. Although there is a correlation between pay and performance, with better performing institutions paying higher salaries, we find limited evidence that this relationship is causal; that is, we find...

This paper seeks to understand the role that peer comparisons play in the determination of executive compensation. I exploit a recent change in the Securities and Exchange Commission's regulations that requires firms to disclose the peer companies used for determining the compensation of their...

The corporate governance debate has focused recently on executive compensation. While defenders of the status quo assert that CEO compensation - and corporate governance generally - is efficient, critics contend that boards have been captured by powerful CEOs who demand excessive pay...

We investigate the determinants of executive pay in a sample of Italian firms. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study on the compensation of Italian executives. We estimate that an increase of real profits per firm by 1 billion lire increases the pay of top executives by only 504...

This study investigates how the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) affects the contractual benefits of using accounting information to determine executive compensation in China. After controlling for firm and corporate governance characteristics, we find...

In recent years, a large academic debate has tried to explain the rapid rise in CEO pay experienced over the past three decades. In this article, I review the main proposed theories, which span views of compensation as the result of a competitive labor market for executives to theories based on...

The rise in the level of executive compensation in international banking in the last two decades has been striking. At the same time, corporate declarations of relative performance evaluation (RPE) have enjoyed widespread popularity. RPE determines the level of CEO pay by accounting for common...

This paper investigates whether and how social-psychological mechanisms, namely reciprocity, demographic similarity, and similar experiences, affect CEO compensation packages with respect to the levels of total, fixed, and short- and mid-term compensation and the variable proportion of the...