Disclosure rules for the Korean Stock Exchange require Korean firms to disclose average executive and employee pay. These disclosures provide a unique opportunity to examine factors influencing the executive pay multiple (executive-employee pay disparity) and its effects on performance. We find...

This paper analyzes CEO compensation in years around and including exceptionally good and poor performance. Using compensation data from 1993 through 2003, the results suggest CEOs are able to increase their compensation before exceptionally bad performance through the timing of option...

Our study presents evidence that social comparison influences both the level of pay and the degree of performance sensitivity within firms. We report pay patterns among division managers of large, multi-business firms over a fourteen-year period. These patterns are consistent with employees...

Many argue that the design of compensation contracts for public company chief executive officers (CEOs) is often not guided by a goal of value maximization. Yet, there is limited direct empirical evidence on the negative consequences of the proposed inefficient contracting between shareholders...

Prodded by economists in the 1970s, corporate directors began adding stock options and bonuses to the already-generous salaries of CEOs with hopes of boosting their companies' fortunes. Guided by largely unproven assumptions, this trend continues today. So what are companies getting in return...

This paper explores five interpretations of “pay for performance”, presents a practical way to measure pay for performance and shows the extent of pay for performance at S&P 1500 companies. The paper argues that pay for performance has three dimensions: the sensitivity of relative pay to...

This paper uses historical data on relative pay and relative performance to quantify three dimensions of pay for performance: pay leverage (a measure of incentive strength), pay alignment (a measure of correlation) and the pay premium at peer group average performance (a measure of performance...

We develop a measurement-error framework for assessing the quality of relative-performance metrics designed to filter out the systematic component of performance, and analyze relative total shareholder return (rTSR)-the predominant metric market participants use to isolate managers'...

This paper focuses on the effect of relative performance evaluation (RPE) on top managers’ compensation in Chinese public firms. Overall, we find no evidence of an RPE effect or any asymmetry in firms’ use of RPE. The results obtained using Albuquerque’s (2009) method are similar to those...

Executives' compensation has been on the forefront of the public and political debate since the recent financial crisis. One of the measures publicly discussed is a general upper boundary to top management compensation packages (“salary cap”, “maximum wage”). While such measures are...