The trends in executive pay and labor income tax rates since the 1940s suggest a high elasticity of taxable income with respect to tax policy. By contrast, the level and structure of executive compensation have been largely unresponsive to tax incentives since the 1980s. However, the relative...

This study investigates dynamics and convergence in CEO pay in Australia’s largest corporations over an 18 year period. Utilizing dynamic panel estimators, we find that CEO pay is driven by dynamic adjustments, firm size, board size, CEO tenure and firm performance. The largest pay-performance...

Basierend auf einem neuen, die deutschen Prime-Standard-Unternehmen für die Jahre 2005 bis 2007 umfassenden Datensatz untersuchen wir die Determinanten der Höhe der Vorstandsvergütung. Dabei unterscheiden wir drei Kategorien möglicher Einflussfaktoren: Unternehmens-, Performance- und...

Building on a unique panel data set of German Prime Standard companies for the period 2005-2008, this paper investigates the influencing factors of both director compensation levels and structure, i.e. the probability of performance-based compensation. Drawing on agency theory arguments and...

This paper surveys the recent literature on CEO compensation. The rapid rise in CEO pay over the past 30 years has sparked an intense debate about the nature of the pay-setting process. Many view the high level of CEO compensation as the result of powerful managers setting their own pay. Others...

This article characterizes the properties of the compensation scheme of delegated portfolio management that would lead to the selection of high risk-high return portfolios. In particular, it provides conditions under which a non-monotone payment structure emerges as an optimal contract, which...

There is a debate on whether executive pay reflects rent extraction due to “managerialpower” or is the result of arms-length bargaining in a principal-agent framework. In this paperwe offer a test of the managerial power hypothesis by empirically examining the CEOcompensation of U.S. public...

We study changes in the design of CEO contracts when firms transition from being public with dispersedshareholders to having strong principals in the form of private equity sponsors. These principals redesignsome, but far from all, contract characteristics. There is no evidence that they reduce...

We analyze a hand-collected dataset of 1682 executive compensation packages at 34 firms included in the main German stock market index (DAX) for the years 2009-2017 in order to investigate the impact of the 2009 say on pay legislation. The findings provide important insights beyond the German...

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...