Executive Compensation: Empirical Essays on the Antecedents and the Consequences, and the Role of Executive Personality

Executive Compensation: Empirical Essays on the Antecedents and the Consequences, and the Role of Executive Personality
Author: Steffen Florian Burkert
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2023-03-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3947095104

Top managers have a significant impact on organizations because they are responsible for the formulation and implementation of corporate strategies, have the visibility and influence to shape the opinions of internal and external stakeholders, and coin the culture of their organizations, affecting employees at every level of the organization. Research has focused on the drivers and consequences of top managers' actions, with a particular focus on executive compensation, but important questions remain unanswered. This dissertation contributes to the literature on top executives by examining the antecedents of executive compensation, the influence of executive compensation on executive behavior, and the interplay of executive compensation and top executive personality. The first study introduces the role of compensation benchmarking for determining executive compensation to the management literature. It finds that benchmarking leads to compensation convergence. The second study examines the impact of executive compensation complexity on firm performance. The results show that compensation complexity is negatively related to accounting-based, market-based, and ESG-based metric of firm performance. The third study explores the implications of relative performance evaluation (RPE) on the imitation behavior of firms. It finds that the introduction of RPE is positively related to the imitation of the strategic actions of peer firms. The fourth study contributes to the growing literature on the impact of corporate social performance (CSP) goals in CEO contracts. Specifically, it examines how and when CSP incentives influence the CEO's attention to corporate social responsibility topics. The final essay examines the role of CEO personality; it finds that differences in CEO personality explain differences in the level of strategic conformity. Taken together, the essays in this dissertation make a significant contribution to the scholarly discourse on the influence of top managers on their companies. The empirical evidence presented expands the current understanding of how top executives affect strategic firm behaviors, and it provides insights for policymakers, managers, and investors.

Research Handbook on Executive Pay

Research Handbook on Executive Pay
Author: John S. Beasley
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 553
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1781005109

Research on executive compensation has exploded in recent years, and this volume of specially commissioned essays brings the reader up-to-date on all of the latest developments in the field. Leading corporate governance scholars from a range of countries set out their views on four main areas of executive compensation: the history and theory of executive compensation, the structure of executive pay, corporate governance and executive compensation, and international perspectives on executive pay. The authors analyze the two dominant theoretical approaches – managerial power theory and optimal contracting theory – and examine their impact on executive pay levels and the practices of concentrated and dispersed share ownership in corporations. The effectiveness of government regulation of executive pay and international executive pay practices in Australia, the US, Europe, China, India and Japan are also discussed. A timely study of a controversial topic, the Handbook will be an essential resource for students, scholars and practitioners of law, finance, business and accounting.

Pay Without Performance

Pay Without Performance
Author: Lucian A. Bebchuk
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2004
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780674020634

The company is under-performing, its share price is trailing, and the CEO gets...a multi-million-dollar raise. This story is familiar, for good reason: as this book clearly demonstrates, structural flaws in corporate governance have produced widespread distortions in executive pay. Pay without Performance presents a disconcerting portrait of managers' influence over their own pay--and of a governance system that must fundamentally change if firms are to be managed in the interest of shareholders. Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried demonstrate that corporate boards have persistently failed to negotiate at arm's length with the executives they are meant to oversee. They give a richly detailed account of how pay practices--from option plans to retirement benefits--have decoupled compensation from performance and have camouflaged both the amount and performance-insensitivity of pay. Executives' unwonted influence over their compensation has hurt shareholders by increasing pay levels and, even more importantly, by leading to practices that dilute and distort managers' incentives. This book identifies basic problems with our current reliance on boards as guardians of shareholder interests. And the solution, the authors argue, is not merely to make these boards more independent of executives as recent reforms attempt to do. Rather, boards should also be made more dependent on shareholders by eliminating the arrangements that entrench directors and insulate them from their shareholders. A powerful critique of executive compensation and corporate governance, Pay without Performance points the way to restoring corporate integrity and improving corporate performance.

Complex Compensation: Empirical Essays on the Impact of Compensation Design on Firm Performance, Turnover, and Organizational Justice

Complex Compensation: Empirical Essays on the Impact of Compensation Design on Firm Performance, Turnover, and Organizational Justice
Author: Tobias Oberpaul
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2024-01-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3947095112

Compensation contracts have become ever more complex and individualized, particularly in the executive compensation domain, where increasingly diverse stakeholder demands and governance requirements have led to the inclusion of more and increasingly interrelated components into compensation contracts. Even the compensation of lower-level employees has become complex as firms individualize employee compensation and use many different rewards simultaneously. Research has examined elements of compensation in isolation but has attempted to avoid the complexities of compensation. This dissertation examines the consequences of compensation complexity and compensation design dispersion and contributes to a better understanding of compensation and its consequences for firms and employees. The first study examines how the complexity of executive compensation contracts affects firm performance. It finds that CEO compensation complexity negatively affects accounting, market, and ESG (i.e., environmental, social, and governance) metrics of firm performance and explores mechanisms that help explain the relationships. The second study examines the effect of compensation design dispersion within top management teams and its impact on executive turnover. The results show that compensation design dispersion affects executive turnover, both directly and in interaction with relative pay level. The third study addresses the role of compensation design dispersion in the development of procedural justice perceptions. Using two experiments, this study shows that compensation design dispersion causes lower procedural justice perceptions, which appears to be less problematic for participants with relatively easier to understand contracts. In summary, this dissertation provides a nuanced overview of complex compensation design and compensation design dispersion. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the effectiveness of compensation as an incentive and sorting tool for organizations, and of the implications of compensation design for the functioning of teams.

The Compensation Handbook

The Compensation Handbook
Author: Lance A. Berger
Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional
Total Pages: 672
Release: 2000-01-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780071378956

Straight answers to your compensation questions An A-to-Z guide to compensation strategy and design, Compensation Handbook, Fourth Edition, has been completely revised and updated to keep you on top of the important changes that have taken place in this area. Editors Lance A. Berger and Dorothy R. Berger have assembled articles by leading compensation practitioners to give you authoritative solutions to a wide range of specific compensation problems. This important new edition shares with you the best thinking on attracting and retaining outstanding employees in a tight market...executive compensation...computers and compensation...how to use a mix of compensation devices...and much, much more.

An Introduction to Executive Compensation

An Introduction to Executive Compensation
Author: Steven Balsam
Publisher: Academic Press
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2002
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780120771264

General readers have no idea why people should care about what executives are paid and why they are paid the way they are. That's the reason that The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, and other popular and practitioner publications have regular coverage on them. This book not only proposes a reason - executives need incentives in order to maximize firm value (economists call this agency theory) - it also describes the nature and design of executive compensation practices. Those incentives can take the form of benefits (salary, stock options), or prerquisites (reflecting the status of the executive within the organizational culture.

Pay for Results

Pay for Results
Author: Mercer, LLC
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2009-03-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 047047811X

The numerous incentive approaches and combinations and their implications can be dizzying even to the compensation professional. Pay for Results provides a road map for developing and implementing executive incentives that drive business needs and strategy. It is filled with specific analytic tools, including tables, exhibits, forms, checklists. In addition, it uncovers myths in performance measurement strategy and design. Timely and thorough, this book expertly shows businesses how to drive their specific needs and strategy. Human resources and compensation officers will discover how to apply performance metrics that align with shareholder investment.

The Handbook of the Economics of Corporate Governance

The Handbook of the Economics of Corporate Governance
Author: Benjamin Hermalin
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 762
Release: 2017-09-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0444635408

The Handbook of the Economics of Corporate Governance, Volume One, covers all issues important to economists. It is organized around fundamental principles, whereas multidisciplinary books on corporate governance often concentrate on specific topics. Specific topics include Relevant Theory and Methods, Organizational Economic Models as They Pertain to Governance, Managerial Career Concerns, Assessment & Monitoring, and Signal Jamming, The Institutions and Practice of Governance, The Law and Economics of Governance, Takeovers, Buyouts, and the Market for Control, Executive Compensation, Dominant Shareholders, and more. Providing excellent overviews and summaries of extant research, this book presents advanced students in graduate programs with details and perspectives that other books overlook. - Concentrates on underlying principles that change little, even as the empirical literature moves on - Helps readers see corporate governance systems as interrelated or even intertwined external (country-level) and internal (firm-level) forces - Reviews the methodological tools of the field (theory and empirical), the most relevant models, and the field's substantive findings, all of which help point the way forward