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...

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...

In recent years, companies have begun to voluntarily disclose alternative measures of CEO compensation. These figures differ — sometimes significantly — from those reported in the summary compensation tables of the annual proxy. The motivation to report this information, however, is not...

In this paper we describe the important features of executive compensation in the US from 1993 to 2006. Some confirm what has been found for earlier periods and some are novel. Notable facts are that: the compensation distribution is highly skewed; each year, a sizeable fraction of chief...

We conduct a field experiment where we vary both the presence of a gift exchange wage and the effect of the worker's effort on the manager's payoff. The results indicate a strong complementarity between the initial wage gift and the agent's ability to "repay the gift". We collect information on...

Making use of unique balanced panel data for the German chemical sector from the years 2008 to 2011, we explore the extent to which managers' compensation was affected by the economic crisis and the extent to which it increased afterwards. Carrying out longitudinal analyses, we find that, on...

We inquire whether public opinion influences executive compensation. During 1992-2008 the negativity of press coverage of CEO pay varied significantly, with stock options being the most discussed pay component. We find that after more negative press coverage of CEO pay firms reduce option grants...