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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the contrasting moderating effect of a firm’s exploration on the relationship between the two types of long-term incentives (stock options/stock ownership) for the chief executive officers and a firm’s long-term performance. Even though the two types of incentives are designed to improve long-term performance, the degrees of impact on long-term performance differ. Based on behavioral agency theory, this study theoretically and empirically examines the role of a firm’s exploration on the above relationship.

This study used three archival sources to obtain data on stock options, stock ownership, patents and exploration, financial measures, and others. Based on a sample of 1,963 firms in various industries from 1995 to 2006, this study tested the moderating effect of a firm’s exploration on the relationship between stock options/ownership and a firm’s performance.

This study reveals the contrasting moderating effect of a firm’s exploration on the relationship between stock options/ownership and a firm’s long-term performance: a positive moderating effect on the relationship between stock options and performance and a negative moderating effect on the relationship between stock ownership and performance. In addition, empirical evidence was added on the inverted U-shaped relationship between stock ownership and a firm’s long-term performance.

There is little research on a firm’s internal characteristics that strengthen or weaken the effects of stock options and stock ownership on firm performance. This study demonstrates the differential moderating effects of exploration on the relationship between stock options/stock ownership and long-term performance. Such effects of exploration come from the different risk features of stock options and stock ownership. The key implication is that stock options could be more effective than stock ownership to enhance a firm’s long-term performance when a firm has a strong exploration orientation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between CEO ownership, stock option compensation, and risk taking. The authors include important CEO power variables as moderators.

The paper uses a longitudinal regression analysis. In addition, the paper includes interactional plots for further interpretation.

The results indicate that CEO ownership reduces risk taking, while there is a partial support that stock options increase risk taking. CEO tenure is a powerful moderator that decreases risk taking in both CEO ownership and CEO stock option scenarios. Board independence, counter to the hypothesis in this paper, may encourage risk taking.

The findings in this paper provide support for the inclusion of CEO power variables in CEO compensation studies. However, the study examines large publicly traded companies; thus, all findings may not be applicable to small- and medium-sized companies.

Scholars have encouraged more complex CEO compensation models and the authors have examined both main effect and interaction models.

Outlines previous research on the role of executive compensation contracts in reducing conflicts of interest between ownership and control; and develops hypotheses on the effects of chief executive officer stock options and share ownership on subsequent firm performance. Suggests that since options do not create losses when share prices decline, they encourage more risk taking than share ownership. Explains the methodology used to test these ideas on 1994‐1996 data for a sample of large US firms and presents the results, which suggest that both stock options and share ownership are positively linked to later firm performance but that the link is stronger for ownership in high risk situations, but lower performance where risk is high. Considers the implications for corporate governance and consistency with other research; and calls for further research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of long horizon institutional ownership on CEO career concerns to meet the short-term earnings benchmark.

Using a sample of 10,565 firm-year observations in the USA, the paper examines the extent to which long horizon institutional investors mitigate the positive relation between CEO turnover and missing the quarterly consensus analyst forecast.

After controlling for the general performance-turnover relation, this paper finds that long horizon institutional investors mitigate the positive relation between CEO turnover and missing the quarterly consensus analyst forecast. This finding is stronger when CEOs focus on long-term value creation and do not sacrifice long-term value to boost current earnings and is stronger when the monitoring intensity by long horizon institutional investors is greater.

The results suggest that long horizon institutional investors serve a monitoring role in alleviating CEO career concerns to meet the short-term earnings benchmark.

This paper contributes to the literature on the relation between long horizon institutional ownership and attenuated managerial short-termism. The literature is silent about why long horizon institutional investors alleviate managerial short-termism. This paper fills this void in the literature by documenting that long horizon institutional investors mitigate CEO career concerns for managerial short-termism. Moreover, this paper contributes to the literature on the monitoring role of institutional investors by documenting the incremental effect of institutional ownership on CEO career concerns to meet the short-term earnings benchmark.

The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence in support of incentive and retention-based explanations for backdating.

The authors use matching-firm techniques and the bivariate logistic model.

Backdating firms tend to be younger and faster growing – the characteristics of firms with growing demand for skilled labor. Further, rather than experiencing poor performance, backdating firms tend to outperform matching firms in both prior- and post-backdating years.

The results suggest that backdating reflects a firm's demand for valuable employees rather than strictly a manifestation of agency problems, as evidenced by previous study.

The purpose of this paper is to provide new evidence on the choice of performance measures used in dual-class firms to incentivize CEOs.

This paper uses coarsened exact matching and propensity score matching to match the dual-class firm sample with a control group of single-class firms. This study uses matching estimators to provide an analysis of how a dual-class structure affects the design of performance measures in performance-based stock awards. In addition, regression models are used to investigate the effect of a dual-class structure on performance measure choices.

This paper finds that market-based metrics are less likely to be used by dual-class firms relative to single-class firms. In addition, peer-based measures are much less common for dual-class than single-class firms. This study also finds that the length of the CEO’s performance evaluation period does not differ between dual-class and single-class firms.

This paper attempts to investigate the choice of performance measures to find out the extent to which the board of directors focuses CEO efforts on firms’ long-term versus short-term objectives.

The findings reveal the relationships between the dual-class stock structure and the contractual features of CEO performance-based stock awards, provide empirical evidence for the company’s compensation committee and provide implications for the evolving practices of performance measures regarding CEO stock compensation. The findings are also useful to regulators, compensation consultants and firms pursuing efficient design of executive compensation.

This paper is among the first to study the determinants of compensation contracts. Second, prior literature seldom controls for CEO stock ownership, but this study matches dual-class firms to a control group of single-class firms that are similar in terms of CEO stock ownership and other important firm characteristics. Finally, these findings suggest that dual-class firms shield their executives from short-term market pressures and design stock compensation contracts that deemphasize volatile stock prices.

This paper examines the link between CEO cash compensation and company performance. We test for the influence of CEO pay on firm performance over a cross section of companies applying the same approach that is used by Lewellen, Loderer, Martin and Blum [1992]. In our study we account for the degree of common stock ownership by the CEO of each company as well. We find a positive and significant connection between the pay of CEOs and the performance of their respective firms. From our results it appears that CEO pay is used to align the interests of shareholders with company CEOs, reducing agency costs within the firm.

We investigate the relationship between chief executive officer (CEO) compensation and a firm's financial performance in the insurance industry to determine CEO pay policies that are more effective in promoting specific financial corporate goals.

Considering different components of executive pay, we investigate the latter’s relationship with the corporate performance of the insurance industry using the generalized method of moments (GMM) model developed for dynamic panel estimation. Our data encompasses the periods before and after the 2008 financial crisis.

We observe that after the crisis the insurance industry experienced a major change in executives’ compensation packages. While CEOs’ compensation was primarily based on bonuses pre-crisis, the average size of the bonus was reduced to one-third of the level, stock awards and nonequity incentives were doubled and option awards increased almost 70 percent in the post-crisis period. It is also evident that the work experience of CEOs and the firm's financial performance play a significant role in determining CEO compensation. As the CEO becomes more experienced, stock awards and option awards replace cash bonus.

The paper finds supporting evidence for the agency-related problem in the insurance industry and the convergence of interest hypothesis, suggesting that a firm's market valuation rises as its managers own an increasingly large portion of the firm. To align the interest of owners with that of management, managers should be converted into owners via stock ownership. The paper addresses a topical issue regarding pay and performance and the effect of the financial crisis in the insurance industry.

The separation of ownership from control in large public corporations and the resulting conflict of interest between shareholders and managers is a fundamental problem in corporate governance. From the shareholders' perspective, an effective compensation contract is one that aligns the manager's incentives with shareholder interests. Numerous studies have investigated the use of performance‐contingent compensation to achieve this linkage, as well as the use of alternative control mechanisms. This study extends this research by examining the effect of risk on the use of performance‐contingent compensation. The effect of risk on compensation contracts is of interest to accountants because of accounting's stewardship role in the organization. In particular, because significant accounting resources are directed toward corporate control, it is of interest to accountants to know when firms are likely to place more or less emphasis on performance‐contingent compensation.

Research on the organizational ramifications of chief executive officer (CEO) greed remains scarce. This study intends to fill this gap by examining the impact of CEO greed on an important yet risky corporate strategy, corporate tax avoidance (CTA). Drawing on upper echelons theory, the authors argue that greedier CEOs tend to engage in more CTA. The relationship is weaker when CEOs experienced economic recessions in their early career and stronger when CEOs are endowed with equity ownership of their respective firms.

The authors test the hypotheses with data from US public firms from 1997 to 2008 and employ the ordinary least square regression analysis to analyze the hypothesized relationships. The authors also test the robustness of the results by performing the two-stage least square regression and propensity score matching analyses.

The findings lend broad support to all the hypotheses. The authors find that greedier CEOs tend to engage in more CTA by paying lower corporate taxes. The impact of greed on CTA is attenuated when CEOs are recession CEOs and is exacerbated when CEOs own large numbers of firm shares.

This paper contributes to the upper echelons research by investigating a novel executive personal characteristic, greed, and its negative impact on an important organizational outcome. This paper also contributes to the growing tax research that recognizes the important role executives play in shaping corporate tax strategies.